
GOD'S COUNTRY 

The Trail to J-fappiness 
James Oliver Curio cod 




Class 1 

Book 

Copyright)^ 



COPYRIGHT DKPOSTT. 



GOD'S COUNTRY 

The Trail to Happiness 



By 
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD 

Author of 
The Valley of Silent Men 
The River's End, etc. 




NEW YORK 



@opolitan Book ^oration 



MCMXXI 



Copyright. 1921, by 
Cosmopolitan Book Corporation 

All rights reserved, including that of translation 
into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian 



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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STA TES OF AMERICA 
tth t ifiuinn & ffobtn Companp 

BOOK MANUFACTURERS 
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MAR 1/ 1921 
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*m I 



The Four Trails 
to Happiness 

The First Trail 



PAGE 



MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS .... 3 

The Second Trail 
I BECOME A KILLER 29 

The Third Trail 
MY BROTHERHOOD 53 

The Fourth Trail 
THE ROAD TO FAITH 83 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/godscountrytrailOOcurw 



The First Trail 
MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS 



The First Trail 

MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS 

npO-NIGHT I am in a little cabin in the 
heart of a great wilderness. Outside it is 
dark. I can hear the wind sighing in the thick 
spruce tops. I hear the laughter of a stream 
out of which 1 took my supper of trout. The 
People of the Night are awake, for a little while 
ago I heard a wolf howl, and, not far away, in 
an old stub, lives an owl that hoots at the light 
in my window. . I think it's going to storm. 
There is a heaviness in the air, and, in the 
drowse of it, the sweetness of distant rain. 

I am strangely contented as I start the writ- 
ing of this strangest of all the things I have 
written. I had never thought to give voice to 
the things that I am about to put on paper; yet 
have I dreamed that every soul in the world 
might know of them. But the task has seemed 
too great for me, and I have kept them within 
myself, expecting them to live and die there. 

I am contented on this black night, with its 
promise of storm, for many reasons — though I 

3 



4 GOD'S COUNTRY 

am in the heart of a peopleless forest fifteen 
hundred miles from my city home. In the first 
place, I have built, with my own hands, this 
cabin that shelters me. My palms are still blis- 
tered by the helve of the ax. I am the architect 
of the fireplace of stone and mud in which a 
small fire burns for cheer, though it is late 
spring, with summer in the breath of the forests. 
I have made the chair in which I sit and the 
table on which I write, and the builder of a 
marble palace could take no greater pleasure in 
his achievement than have I. 

I am contented because, just now, I have the 
strange conviction that, in this wild and people- 
less place, I am very close to that which many 
peoples have sought through many ages and 
have not found. 

In the distance, I can hear thunder, and a 
flash of lightning illumines my window. A cry 
of a loon comes with the flash. It is strange; 
it is weird — and wonderful. And also, in a 
way, it has just occurred to me that it is a fitting 
kind of night to begin that which I have been 
asked to write. For this night, for a short 
space, will be like the great world at large — a 
world that is rocking in the throes of a mighty 
tumult — a tumult of unrest, of discontent, of 



MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS 5 

mad strivings, of despair, and lack of faith — 
a world that is rushing blindfold into unknown 
things, that is seeking rest and peace, yet can 
never find them. 

It is, I repeat, a strange night to begin the 
writing of that which I have been asked to 
write, and yet I do not think that I would have 
the night changed. It seems to picture to me 
more vividly the unrest of the world fifteen hun- 
dred miles away — and fifteen thousand miles 
away. I seem to see with clearer vision what 
has happened during the past two years — the 
mad questing of a thousand million people for a 
spiritual thing which they cannot find. I see, 
from this vantage-point of the deep forest, a 
world torn by five hundred schisms and reli- 
gions, and I see not one religion that fills the 
soul with faith and confidence. I see the multi- 
tudes of the earth reaching up their arms and 
crying for the Great Mystery of life to be 
solved. Questions that are racking the earth 
come to me in the whisperings of the approach- 
ing storm. Can the ghosts of the dead return? 
Can the spirits of the departed commune with 
the living? Is the world on the edge of 
an inundation of spiritualism? Does the 
salvation of humanity lie there — or there — 



6 GOD'S COUNTRY 

or there? What shall I believe? What can 
I believe ? 

The rain is beginning to beat on the roof of 
my cabin and, in number, the drops of the rain 
remind me of the millions and the tens of mil- 
lions of restless men and women who are read- 
ing avidly, in the pages of magazines and books, 
the " experiences " of those who are giving voice 
to new creeds and new beliefs or reviving old 
ones long lost in the dust of forgotten ages. 

Ghosts have been revived; spirits are on the 
move again. New generations are drinking in 
with wonder and suspense the whole bagful of 
tricks worn out ten thousand generations ago. 
To-morrow it may be the revival of witchcraft. 
And the next day new prophets may arise and 
new religions take the place of the old. For 
so travel the minds of men; and so they have 
traveled for hundreds of thousands of years be- 
fore Christ was born and Christianity was 
known; and so they will go on seeking until God 
is found in a form so simple and intimate that 
all humanity will at last understand. 

The storm has broken. It is like a deluge 
over the cabin. The thunder and crash of it is 
in the spruce tops — and such is the dreadfulness 
of the tumult and the aloneness of the place 



MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS 7 

that I am in, that I would cease where I am did 
I think that anything I am about to say might 
be sacrilege. But when a mind gives expression 
to that which it holds as truth, there cannot be 
sacrilege. 

I have been asked to put on paper some- 
thing of that religion which I have discovered 
for myself in nature. There are many who 
will laugh; there are many who will disbelieve, 
for it will be impossible for me to make myself 
entirely clear in such a matter as this. For I 
have found what, to me, is God; and I cannot 
expect to startle the world, even if I desired to 
do so, for what I have found has been found 
in a very simple way — without bringing spirits 
back from the dead, or hearing voices out of 
tombs, or gathering faith through the inspira- 
tion of mediums. 

I have found the heart of nature. I believe 
that its doors have opened to me, and that I have 
learned much of its language. Through adven- 
ture and bloodshed I have come to a great un- 
derstanding; and understanding has brought me 
health and faith and a joy in life. And because 
these things will do the world no harm, and may 
do some good, I am undertaking to write the 
story of a great and inclusive God whom men 



8 GOD'S COUNTRY 

and women and little children should be made 
to know, but to whom, unfortunately, the swift 
pace of the times has made most of us 
strangers. 

I fear that I am going to shock many people, 
and so I am of a mind to get the shock over with 
and come to the meat of what I have to say. 
But I shall start with something which those 
who read this must concede — that everyone in 
the world seems to be looking for something 
which will bring him more comfort and more 
happiness from life. That, I think, is the rea- 
son the Catholic Church is the only Church 
which is growing to any extent. It is growing 
because it is the only Church which is holding 
out its arms as a mother and giving a human 
being a breast upon which to lay his head when 
he is in trouble. Yet I am not a Catholic. 
Neither am I a Protestant. I do not belong to 
the High, Low, Broad, or Free Church. I do 
not confess to Romanism, Popery, or Protest- 
antism any more than I do to Mohammedan- 
ism, Calvinism, or the doctrines of the Latter- 
Day Saints. I am not a sectarian any more than 
I am a Shaker or a Restitutionist. I do not be- 
lieve that one necessarily goes to hell because he 
does not accept Christ as the Son of God. I 



MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS 9 

believe that Christ was a good man and a great 
teacher of his times, just as there have been 
other good men and great teachers in their 
times. I can look upon the Mussulman at 
prayer, or the Parsee at his devotion, or the 
Eskimo calling upon his unseen spirits with the 
same feeling of brotherhood and understand- 
ing that I can see a congregation of Baptists or 
Methodists singing their praise to the God on 
high. I do not pity or condemn the African 
savage and the Indian of the Great Barrens 
because they see their God through another 
vision than that of the Christian. There were 
many roads that led to old Rome. And there 
are many roads, no matter how twisted and 
dark they seem to us, that lead to the better 
after-life. 

I wish that some mighty power would rise 
that could show to man how little and how in- 
significant he is. Only therein, I think, could the 
thorns and brambles be taken out of that path to 
peace and contentment which he would like to 
find, and would find if he were not blinded by 
his own importance. He is the supreme egoist 
and monopolist. His conceit and self -sufficiency 
are at times almost blasphemous. He is the 
human peacock, puffed up, inflated, flushed in 



io GOD'S COUNTRY 

the conviction that everything in the universe 
was made for him. He looks down in super- 
cilious lordship on all other life in creation. He 
goes out and murders millions of his kind with 
his scientific inventions; yet he calls a tiger bad 
and a pest because the tiger occasionally kills 
the two-legged thing that hunts it. If he kills a 
man illegally, it is called murder, and he is 
hanged and goes to hell. If his government 
tells him it is proper to kill a thousand men, he 
kills them, and is called a hero — and a chosen 
place is kept waiting for him in heaven. His 
conceit blinds him to fact. He thinks our little 
earth was the chosen creation of the Supreme 
Power — forgetting that the earth is but a fly- 
speck compared with the other worlds in space. 
He thinks that Christ was born a long time ago, 
and that time began with our own knowledge of 
history — when, as a matter of fact, he has no 
reason for disbelieving that man lived and died 
hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that 
countless religions have come and gone in the 
eons of the past. He does not stop to reason 
that, in number, he is as a drop in the ocean 
compared with other beating hearts on earth. 
To me, every heart that beats is a spark from 
the breath of God. I believe that the warm and 



MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS n 

beating heart in the breast of a singing robin is 
as precious to the Creator of things as the heart 
of a man counting money. I believe that a vital 
spark exists in every blade of grass and in every 
leaf of the trees. It is the great law of exist- 
ence that life must destroy in order to live, and 
when destruction is inevitable and necessary, it 
ceases to be a misdemeanor. But to let live, 
when it is not necessary to destroy, is a beautiful 
thing to consider. 

Before men find a satisfying faith and peace, 
they must come to see their own littleness. 
They must discover that they are not alone in a 
partnership with God, but that all manifesta- 
tion of life, whether in tree or flower or flesh 
and blood, is a spark loaned for a space by that 
Supreme Power toward which we all, in our in- 
dividual ways, are groping. There is one 
teacher very close to us, as close to the poor as 
to the rich, to show us this littleness and make 
us understand. That teacher is nature — and, in 
my understanding of things, all nature is rest 
and peace. I believe that nature is the Great 
Doctor, and, if given the chance, can cure more 
ills and fill more empty souls than all the physi- 
cians and preachers of the earth. I have had 
people say to me that my creed is a beautiful 



12 GOD'S COUNTRY 

one for a person as fortunately situated as my- 
self, but that it is impossible for the great multi- 
tudes to go out and find nature as 1 have found 
it. To these people, I say that one need not 
make a two-thousand-mile trip along the Arctic 
coast and live with the Eskimo to find nature. 
After all, it is our nerves that kill us in the long 
run, our over-restless minds, our worrying, 
questing brains. And nature whispers its great 
peace to these things even in the rustling leaves 
of a corn field — if one will only get acquainted 
with that nature. And my desire — my ambi- 
tion — the great goal I wish to achieve in my 
writings is to take my readers with me into the 
heart of this nature. I love it, and I feel that 
they must love it — if I can only get the two 
acquainted. 

" Fine line of talk for a man whose home is 
filled from cellar to garret with mounted heads 
and furs," I hear some of my good friends say. 

Quite true, too. It is hard for one to confess 
oneself a murderer, and it is still harder to ex- 
plain one's regeneration. Yet, to be genuine, I 
must at least make the confession, though it is 
less the fact of murder than the fact of re- 
generation that I have the inclination to empha- 
size, now that I have the opportunity. There 



MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS 13 

was a time when I took pride in the wideness 
and diversity of my killings. I was a destroyer 
of life. Now I am only glad that these killings 
ultimately brought me to a discovery which is 
the finest thing I have to contemplate through 
the rest of my existence. 

In my home are twenty-seven guns, and all 
of them have been used. Many of the stocks 
are scarred with tiny notches whereby I kept 
track of my " kills." With them, I have left red 
trails to Hudson's Bay, to the Barren Lands, 
to the country of the Athabasca and the Great 
Bear, to the Arctic Ocean, to the Yukon and 
Alaska, and throughout British Columbia. 
This is not intended as a paean of triumph. It is 
a fact which I wish had never existed. And 
yet it may be that my love of nature and the 
wild things, at the last, is greater because of 
those reckless years of killing. I am inclined 
to believe so. In my pantheistic heart, the 
mounted heads in my home are no longer 
crowned with the grandeur of trophies, but 
rather with the nobility of martyrs. I love 
them. I commune with them. I am no longer 
their enemy, and I warm myself with the belief 
that they know I am fighting for them now. 
, In this religion of the open, I have come to 



i 4 GOD'S COUNTRY 

understand and gather peace from the whisper- 
ing voices and even the silence of all God-loving 
things. I have learned to love trees, and there 
are times when I put my hands on them because 
I love them, and rest my head against them be- 
cause they are comrades and their comradeship 
and their might give me courage. There is a 
gnarled old cripple of an oak in the yard of my 
Michigan home, a broken and twisted dwarf 
which many people have told me to destroy. 
But that tree and I have " talked over " many 
things together; it has pointed out to me how 
to stand up under adversity, has shown me how 
to put up a man's fight. For, eaten to the heart, 
a deformity among its kind, each spring and 
summer saw it making its valiant struggle to 
" do its best." It was then I became its friend, 
gave it a helping hand, stopped its decay and 
death, and each season now the old oak is 
stronger, and often I go out and sit with my 
back against it, and I hear and understand its 
voice, and I know that it is a great friend that 
will never do me wrong. 

It is thus that this religion of mine finds its 
strength from the sources of great and un- 
known power. But before it comes in all its 
peace and joy, man must bring down his head 



MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS 15 

from out of the clouds of egoism, and say, 
" The oak is as great as I — perhaps greater." 

Not long ago, it seemed to me that my world 
had gone dark and that it would never grow 
completely light again. In perhaps the darkest 
hour, I flung myself down upon the ground close 
to the bank of a stream. And then, close over 
my head — »so close I could have tossed a peb- 
ble to it — -a warbler near burst its little throat 
in song. And the miracle of it was that it was 
a dark and sunless day. But the warbler sang, 
and then he chirped in the boughs above; and 
when I looked at the ground beside me again, I 
saw there, peeping up at me out of the grass, a 
single violet. And the bird and the violet gave 
me more courage and cleared my world for 
me more than all the human friends who had 
told me they were sorry. The violet said, " I 
am still here ; you will never lose me," and the 
little warbler said, " I will always sing — 
through all the years you live." And stronger 
than ever came the faith in me that these things 
were no more an accident of creation than man 
himself. 

Once I saw this Great Doctor of mine a 
burning, vibrant force in a room of a crowded 
tenement, from the roof of which one could 



1 6 GOD'S COUNTRY 

not see a blade of grass or a tree. In fact, that 
force filled three rooms, in which lived a man 
and woman and five children. I spent an hour 
in those rooms on a Sunday afternoon, and the 
experience of that hour in a hot and crowded 
tenement was a mightier sermon than was ever 
preached to me in the heart of a forest. At 
every window was a box in which green stuff 
was growing. There were flowers in pots. A 
pair of canary-birds looked down upon the 
smoky roofs of a great city and sang. What in- 
terested me most was two contrivances the man 
had made to force oats into swift germination 
and growth. In a week, he told me, the green 
sprout of an oat would be two inches long. 
Then I saw why they were grown. Several 
times while I was there would a dove come to 
a window and wait for a bit of the green. I 
could see they were different doves. They told 
me at least a dozen were accustomed to come in 
that way. They were the children's pets. A 
little baby in arms cooed at them and waved his 
arms in delight. I have seen many poor tene- 
ment families, but that, I think, was the only 
happy one. The singing of the birds, the com- 
ing of the doves, the growing of green things 
in their room were their inspiration, their hope, 



MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS 17 

the promise of dreams that would some day- 
come true. Nature had become their religion, 
and yet they did not know it as such. It was 
calling them out into the great open spaces — and 
they were living in anticipation of that day when 
they would answer the call. 

Because I have spent much of my time in 
adventuring in distant wildernesses, and explor- 
ing where other men have npt gone, it has been 
accepted by many that my love for nature 
means a love for the distant and, for most 
people, the inaccessible wilds. It is true 
that in the vast and silent places one comes 
nearer, perhaps, to the deeper truths of 
life. Of the wild and its miracles I love to 
write, and when I come to that part of my story, 
I shall possibly be happiest. But I would be 
unfair to myself, and the religion of nature 
itself, if the great truth were not first empha- 
sized that its treasures are to be possessed by 
mankind wherever one may turn — even in a 
prison cell. I was personally in touch with one 
remarkable instance of this in the Michigan 
State Penitentiary, at Jackson, where a canary- 
bird and a red geranium saved a man from mad- 
ness and eventually gained him a pardon, send- 
ing him out into the world a living being with a 



1 8 GOD'S COUNTRY 

new and better religion than he had ever 
dreamed of before. 

But the open skies and the free air were in- 
tended from the beginning of things as the 
greatest gifts to man, and it is there, if one is 
sick in body or soul, that one should seek. 
Whether it is a mile or a thousand miles from 
a city makes little difference. For nature is the 
universal law. It is everywhere. It is neither 
mystery nor mysterious. Its pages are open; its 
life is vibrant with the desire to be understood. 
The one miracle is for man to bring himself 
down out of the clouds of his egoism and re- 
place his passion for destruction with the desire 
to understand. 

I have in mind a case in point. 

I had a very dear friend, a newspaper man, 
whose wife had died. I don't know that I ever 
saw a man more utterly broken up. for his love 
for her was more than love. It was worship. 
He grew faded and thin, and a gray patch 
over his temple turned white. The mightiest 
efforts of his friends could do nothing. He 
wanted to be alone, alone in his home, where 
he could grieve himself to death by inches. I 
knew that his case was harder because he was 



MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS 19 

merely tolerant of religion. One day, the idea 
came to me that resulted in his spiritual and 
physical salvation. I took him in my auto, and 
we went out into the country four or five miles, 
opened a gate, drove down a long lane, and 
stopped at the edge of a forty-acre wood. 

11 Fred, I am going to show you a wonderful 
city," I said. " Come with me — quietly." 

We climbed over the fence, and I led him to 
the heart of the wood, and there we sat down, 
with our backs to a log. 

" Now, just to humor me, be very still," 
I said. " Don't move, don't speak — just 
listen." 

It was three o'clock in the afternoon, that 
wonderful time of a summer day when nature 
seems to rouse herself from midday slumber to 
fill the world with her rustling life. The sun 
fell slantwise through the wood, and here and 
there, under the roofs of the trees, we could see 
golden pools and streams of it on the cool 
earth. 

" This is one of the most wonderful cities 
in the world," I whispered, " and there are 
hundreds and thousands of such cities, some of 
them within the reach of all." 

The musical ripple of a creek came to our 



20 GOD'S COUNTRY 

ears. And then, slowly at first, there came upon 
my friend the wonder of it all. He under- 
stood — at last. About us, through all that forty 
acres of wood, the air seemed to whisper forth 
a strange and wonderful life. Over our heads, 
we heard a grating sound. It was a squirrel 
gnawing through the shell of a last autumn's 
nut. On an old stub, a woodpecker hammered. 
Close about us were the " cheep, cheep, cheep," 
and " twit, twit, twit," of little brown brush- 
birds. A warbler burst suddenly into a glorious 
snatch of song. A quarter of a mile away, a 
crow cawed, and between us and the crow we 
heard a fox-squirrel barking, and, a little later, 
saw it, with its mate, scrambling in play up and 
down the trees. My friend caught my arm and 
pointed. He was becoming interested, and what 
he saw was a fat young woodchuck passing near 
us on a foraging expedition to a neighboring 
clover field. 

For an hour we did not move, and through 
all that city was the drone and voice of life, and 
that life was a soft and wonderful song, sooth- 
ing one almost to sleep. And when, at last, my 
friend whispered again, " It sounds as though 
everything is talking," I knew that the spirit of 
the thing had got into him. Then I drew his 



MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS 21 

attention to a colony of big black ants whose 
fortress was in the log against which we were 
resting. They were working. Two of them 
were trying to drag a dead caterpillar over my 
friend's knee. When we rose to go, I led him 
past a little swale in which a score of black- 
birds had bred their young. On a slender wil- 
low, a bobolink was singing. A land-turtle lum- 
bered back into the water, and the bright eyes 
of green-headed frogs stared at us from patches 
of scum. Under a bush, a score of toads were 
teaching their tiny youngsters to swim. When 
my friend saw the little fellows clinging to their 
mothers' backs, he laughed — the first time in 
many months. 

When we went back to the car, I said: 
"You have seen just one ten-thousandth of 
what nature holds for you and every other man 
and woman. You haven't believed in God very 
strongly. But you've got to now. That's God 
back there in the wood.'* 

That was four years ago. To-day, that man 
not only lives in the heart of nature but, from a 
special assignment man, he has risen to the man- 
aging editorship of a big metropolitan daily. 
He has only his summer vacation in which to 
get out into the big woods, but he has made 



22 GOD'S COUNTRY 

room for nature all about him. From early- 
spring until late autumn, his front and back 
yard fairly burst with life. And it is not, like 
most yards, merely for show and passing pleas- 
ure to the eyes. He has brought himself down 
out of the clouds of man's egoism, and is learn- 
ing and taking strength from nature — which he 
now worships as the great u I am." He has 
developed a hobby for " interbreeding plants," 
as he calls it, and especially gladioli. Each 
morning in spring and summer and autumn, he 
goes out into his garden, and, from the thou- 
sand living things there, he receives strength 
for his nerve-racking duties of the day; and at 
night, after his task is done, he returns to his 
garden to seek that peace which is the great 
and vibrant force of the life that is there. Dur- 
ing the months of winter, he has his little con- 
servatory. And this man — for more than thirty 
years — hardly knew whether an oak grew from 
an acorn or a seed! 

Yet has he one great regret. And more than 
once he has said to me, with that grief in his 
voice which will never quite die out: "If we 
had only found these things before, she would 
be with me now. I am convinced of it. It was 
this strength she needed to keep her from fading 



MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS 23 

away — to build her up into joyous life again. 
Sometimes I wonder why the Great Power that 
is above did not let her live to go into the wood 
with us that day." 

Hours have passed since I first sat down to 
write these thoughts that were in my mind. 
The storm has passed, and, following it, there 
has come a marvelous silence. Both my door 
and window are open, and there is rare sweet- 
ness in the breath of the rain-washed air. I 
can hear the near-by trees dripping. The creek 
runs with a louder ripple. The moon is shim- 
mering through the fleecy clouds that are racing 
south and east — toward my " civilized " home, 
fifteen hundred miles away. Over all this world 
of mine there is, just now, a vast and voiceless 
quiet. And if I were superstitious, or filled with 
the imagination of some of the prophets of old, 
I am sure I would hear a Voice speaking out of 
that mighty solitude, and it would say: 

" O you mortal, blind — blind as the rocks 
which make up the mountains ! 

" Blind as the trees which you think have 
neither ears nor eyes ! 

11 Made to see, yet unseeing; making mys- 
tery out of that which was born with you ; seek- 



24 GOD'S COUNTRY 

ing — yet seeking afar for that which lies close 
at hand! 

" You want peace. You go in quest of a 
Breast mightier than all life to rest thy tired 
head upon. And thy quest is like the drifting of 
a ship without a rudder at sea. For you think 
that the world is young because thou livest in 
it now — and it is old, so old that thousands and 
tens of thousands of peoples lived and died 
before Christ was born. You think that civiliza- 
tion has come to pass, and ' civilization ' has 
died a thousand times under the dust of the 
ages. You believe you are treading the only 
path to God — yet have a million billion people 
died before you, unknowing the religions which 
you now know. 

" O you mortals of to-day, you are small and 
near-sighted, and hard of hearing — even more 
than they who lived a million years before you, 
when the world was an hour or two younger 
than now! 

" What are you? Proud of thy purse, vain 
of thy power, conceited in thy self-glorifica- 
tion — yet you seek a simple thing and cannot 
find it. You cannot find rest. You cannot find 
faith. You cannot find understanding. You 
cannot find that Breast mightier than all life 



MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS 25 

upon which to rest thy head when the end comes 
and when you go to join those trillions who 
have gone before you. 

" And, in your despair, you cry out that you 
know not which way to turn, that you seek in 
darkness, that the world is a wilderness of 
schisms and religions, and that you cannot tell 
which is the right and which is the wrong. For 
you know that worlds have lived and died 
through the eons of centuries before Christian- 
ity was born. And you are oppressed by doubt 
even as you grope ! 

" Yet you know deep in thy soul that the 
heavens were not an accident. You know that 
hundreds and thousands of worlds greater than 
thine own have traveled their paths in space 
for eternities. You know that the sun was set 
in the skies so long ago that all the people of 
the earth could not count the years of its life. 
And you know that a Great Hand placed it 
there. And that Hand, you say, was God. 

" Yet you seek — and you seek — and you 
seek — and doubt everlastingly clouds thine eyes; 
and when darkness comes and you stand at the 
edge of the Great Beyond, you look back, and — 
lo! — the path you have traveled seems very 
short, and it is cluttered with brambles and 



26 GOD'S COUNTRY 

thorns and the wreckage of shattered hopes and 
wasted years. 

" And then you see the Light! 

11 And, as thy spirit departs, the mystery un- 
veils — the answer comes. 

" For that which you sought, you looked too 
far. Close under thy feet and close over thy 
head might you have found it! " 



The Second Trail 
I BECOME A KILLER 



The Second Trail 

, I BECOME A KILLER 

'"lPHIS morning is a glory of sunshine and 
peace after last night's rain. It seems 
inconceivable that the blue sky above the forest 
was filled a few hours ago with the crash of 
thunder and the blaze of lightning. I was up 
at dawn, wakened by a pair of red squirrels 
playing upon the roof of my cabin. Together we 
watched the sun rise, and after that they chat- 
tered about my open door while I prepared my 
breakfast. We are becoming great friends. 
One of them I have given the name of Nuts, 
and for no reason in the world unless it is be- 
cause there are no nuts up here ; and the other, 
the sleek, beautiful little female, I call Spoony 
because she looks at me so slyly, with her pretty 
head perked on one side, as if flirting with 
me. 

It is only eight o'clock, yet we have been up 
nearly four hours. At the edge of the creek, 
less than a stone's throw from the cabin, I have 
built me a narrow table of smooth-hewn saplings 

29 



30 GOD'S COUNTRY 

between two old spruce trees, and this is my 
open-air studio when the weather is fine. Word 
of it has gone abroad, though I am many hun- 
dreds of miles from civilization. Many kinds 
of wild things have come to get acquainted with 
me, fascinated chiefly, I think, by the marvelous 
new language of my clicking typewriter. The 
welcome and friendship of these little wilder- 
ness-hearts are growing nearer and more ap- 
parent to me every day; and with each day the 
Great Truth speaks to me even more clearly 
than the day before — that each of these beating 
hearts, like my own, is a part of that nature 
which I worship and is as vitally a spark of its 
life as the heart which is beating inside my own 
flannel shirt. 

These friends of mine, gathering about me 
more intimately and in greater number with 
each passing day, are individuals to me because 
I have come to understand thern and know their 
language. There is the Artful Dodger, for in- 
stance — I sometimes call him Bill Sykes or Cap- 
tain Kidd — screaming close over my head this 
very moment. In very intimate moments I call 
him Arty, or Kid, or Bill. He is a big blue jay. 
In spite of all that has been said and written 
against him, I have a very brotherly affection 



I BECOME A KILLER 31 

for Bill. He is a man's man, among birds, not- 
withstanding that he occasionally breakfasts on 
the eggs of other birds, and kills more than is 
good for his reputation. Also, he is the great- 
est liar and the biggest fraud and the most 
brazen-faced cheat in the bird kingdom. But I 
know Bill intimately now, where I used to kill 
him as a pest, and I love him for all his sins. 

He is a pirate who never loses his sense of 
humor. He is always raising a disturbance just 
for the excitement of it, and when he has drawn 
a crowd, so to speak, he will slip slyly away 
to some nearby vantage-point and laugh and 
chuckle over the rumpus he has raised. Right 
now, he is screaming himself hoarse forty feet 
above my head. Two others have joined him, 
and they are making such a bedlam of sound 
that Nuts and Spoony have ceased their chat- 
tering. There ! — I have fired a stick at them, 
and they are gone. They have had their joke, 
and are quite satisfied — for the present. 

I can hear the musical rippling of the creek 
again, now that Bill and his blustering pals are 
gone, and my typewriter is like a tiny machine 
gun sending its clicking notes out into the still 
forest. A pair of moose-birds, almost as big as 
the jays, are hopping about, so near that, at 



32 GOD'S COUNTRY 

times, they are perched on the end of my sapling 
table. They are the tamest birds in the wilder- 
ness, and within another day or so will be eating 
out of my hand. Unlike the jays, they make no 
disturbance. They are soft and quiet, never 
making a sound, and their big, beautiful eyes 
fairly pop with their intense interest in me. I 
like their company, because there is a philosophy 
about them. They never tire of looking at me, 
and studying me, and at times I have the very 
pleasant fancy that they are bursting with a de- 
sire to speak. They are very gentle, and never 
fight or scold or commit any sins that I know 
of; and just now, as the two look at me with 
their big soft eyes, 1 find myself wondering 
which of us is of most account in the final 
analysis of things. 

Ten or fifteen rods above me, the creek 
widens and forms a wide pool overhung with 
trees, so that, in the hottest weather, it must 
be a delightfully refreshing place. I can see it 
plainly from where I am sitting, for the creek 
twists a little, so that it is running directly 
toward me when I look in that direction. Many 
wild things come to that pool. This morning, 
I found a bear-track there, and the fresh hoof- 
prints of a doe and fawn. Yesterday, a pair 



I BECOME A KILLER 33 

of traveling otters discovered it, but when I tried 
them out with the voice of my typewriter, they 
turned back. I am confident they will return, 
and that we shall get acquainted. 

At the present moment, in looking toward 
the pool, I am struck by what at first thought 
I might consider a discordant note in this won- 
derland of quiet and peace that is about me. 
At the edge of the pool, rigid and watchful, a 
hawk is poised on a dead limb projecting from 
a lightning-struck stub. He is hungry and eager 
to kill. I have seen him launch himself twice 
after a victim, but each time without success. 
Finally, he will succeed. He will kill a living 
thing that he himself may continue to live. Yet 
I have no inclination to shoot him. For to live, 
and to cherish that spark of life that is in him, is 
as much his right as it is mine. He is not, like 
man, a killer for the love of killing. He wants 
his breakfast. 

And in fairness to him I think of two tender 
young spruce-partridges which I shot late last 
evening, and which I shall roast for my dinner, 
along with a potato and a flavor of bacon. My 
religion does not demand vegetarianism any 
more than it does flesh; for that, too, is life. 
For the trees whispering above me now are as 



34 GOD'S COUNTRY 

alive to me as the moose-birds perched at the 
end of my table, yet when necessity comes I cut 
them down with an ax, and make a cabin or cook 
my food with them. All nature cries out that 
life must exist upon life, that one tree must grow 
upon the mold of another, that for each green 
blade of grass another blade must die. It is not 
against a wise and necessary destruction that the 
God of all nature cries out. The crime — the 
crime greater than all other crimes — is destruc- 
tion without cause. 

That is what I must come to now, even in this 
glory of peace that is whispering about me — I 
must face the task of confessing my own sins as 
a killer, as a destroyer of life for the love and 
thrill of killing. I was born, like all the chil- 
dren of men, a monumental egoist. My par- 
ents were egoists. My forefathers for ten 
thousand generations were egoists before me, 
and I was the last product of their egoism — 
one of the billion and a half people who 
are living to-day in the blindness of a self- 
conceit that has filled their worlds with schisms 
and religions as false and as unstable as the 
treacherous sands of human " almightiness " 
upon which they have been built. 



I BECOME A KILLER 35 

From the beginning, I did not need argument 
or education to tell me that I was the greatest 
of all created things — that my particular brand 
of life, of all life on the earth, was the only- 
life that God had intended to be inviolate. 
That fact was pounded home to me in the pub- 
lic schools; it was preached to me in the 
churches. I was part and parcel of the great 
" I Am." For me, all the universe had been 
built. For me, the Great Hereafter was solely 
created. All other life was merely incidental, 
and created especially for my benefit. It was 
mine to do with as I pleased. In a mild sort 
of way, the school and the church told me to 
have a little charity, and not to " hurt the poor 
little birdies." 

But church and school did not tell me, and 
has never told its pupils, that all other life on 
the earth was as precious as my own, and had 
an equal right to fight for its existence. It is 
true I was told that never a sparrow falls that 
God does not see it, but it is also true that, for 
six years, my state urged its children to kill spar- 
rows for a bounty of two cents a head. I found 
no course in school or college that attempted 
to teach me that the spark of life animating my 
own body was no different from the sparks 



36 GOD'S COUNTRY 

which animated all other living things. Both re- 
ligion and school instilled into me that I was 
next in place to God. All other life, from the 
life of trees and flowers to that of beasts and 
birds, was put on earth for my special benefit. 
No other life had a right to exist unless the 
human egoist saw fit to let it live. And all this 
simply because human life happened to be the 
most powerful life, and cleverest in the art and 
science of destroying other life. 

I wonder what would happen if for ten gen- 
erations the churches and schools would teach 
their little children and their grown-ups that 
there is a heaven for flowers and trees and birds 
and butterflies just as surely as there is a heaven 
for man ! What would happen if the teaching 
of the Great Truth of nature began in the 
kindergarten, and went on through the lives of 
men and women, growing stronger in the race 
as generation added itself to generation? It is 
something to think about in these days when, in 
our madness for a faith, we are reviving ghosts 
and phantom voices and are frightening our 
children again with the diseased and weird be- 
lief that the spirits of the dead can come back 
to us. We want something that is clean and 
healthy and inspiring, something that is beau- 



I BECOME A KILLER 37 

tiful to contemplate, and which is not an over- 
whelming insult to that Great Power of the uni- 
verse of which we are so small a part — and in 
the kindergarten we could plant the seed of 
that thing, so that, through the school and the 
church and all life, it would continue to grow 
stronger with each generation, until, at last, 
man would shake off that deadliest of all his 
enemies, his own egoism and self-conceit. 
Then, and not until then, will he find content- 
ment and peace and happiness in the brother- 
hood of all other life that is about him. 

But I seem to be evading the issue — my own 
confession as a monumental egoist and a killer. 
I have said that my parents were egoists, like 
all their forefathers before them. Yet the 
world never held a better mother than mine. 
I do not except any who may sit in heaven at 
the present time. And my father, as a man, was 
far better than his son will ever be. He was a 
gentleman of the old school, living, as he died, 
an example of courage and fearlessness and 
honor to all who knew him. Yet did these two 
splendid people, like all other parents, foster 
and cultivate my egoism from the beginning. 
They did it unconsciously, blindly, as hundreds 
of millions of other parents are doing to-day. 



38 GOD'S COUNTRY 

My father loved hunting and fishing, and at 
eight years of age I possessed my own gun. I 
remember with what pride he taught me to 
shoot and to stalk my first living victims; and 
when we returned from a hunt, if I had killed 
anything, it was always to me that my beloved 
mother gave her greatest attention and com- 
mendation. We lived on an Ohio farm then, 
and I became a sort of boy prodigy in the art of 
hunting. When I was nine years old, a news- 
paper in a near-by city published a story of my 
prowess, and I do not think I was more puffed 
up over it than my father himself. By the time 
I was twelve, I had lost all respect for that life 
which the laws of our state said I might take. I 
had a fine collection of birds' eggs, and another 
" splendid " collection of birds' wings. My 
room was decorated with the wings. 

I always recall with an odd sort of feeling 
that at this particular height of my boyish 
slaughter of life I " got religion," and got it 
hard. At Joppa, a M four-corners " two miles 
from our farm, a series of revival meetings 
was going on that winter, and I cannot remem- 
ber anyone in all our community who did not get 
the religious fever, except most of the young- 
sters. But it hit me hard. I felt that I was 



I BECOME A KILLER 39 

actually inspired. So deeply did the excited 
preachings effect my mind that frequently, when 
I was alone, I felt that angels were with me. 
One moonlight night, in returning from a re- 
vival, I actually saw an angel, and the beau- 
tiful thing with white wings and white raiment 
and wonderful flowing hair walked halfway 
home with me. When I told that story at 
school the next day, and insisted that it was true, 
I had five different fights. My mother said that 
it probably was true, for she was delighted that 
I had become religious. So I fought, and 
licked — -and got licked — for about a month be- 
cause of my faith. 

But what I am coming to is this: Though 
practically our whole township was converted, 
at no time did this religion tell me to stop kill- 
ing. So inspired was I that Mr. Teachout, the 
revivalist, had me give a short " sermon " one 
evening — and I recall vividly how, in " intro- 
ducing " me, he said, in a loud voice and with 
a great flourish of his arms, that I " was the 
best hunter in all Erie County and could kill 
more game in a day than almost any grown 
hunter there. " Whereupon there was a mighty 
applause from the hundred people present, and 
I was the proudest youngster in Ohio. 



4 o GOD'S COUNTRY 

Why? 

Because from a church rostrum I was hailed 
as the greatest boy killer in that county! No 
one of all those Christians told me that I should 
stop killing. They made a hero of me because 
I was already becoming a master in the art of 
killing. They built up my egoism to a point 
where it became blasphemous — to a point where 
it more than offset my mother's pleadings that 
I stop shooting birds for their wings. Then 
came a thing which, as I look back upon it now, 
seems to me monstrous. There was to be a big 
" hunters' supper " to end the revival. The 
men chose sides, and on a certain day all these 
men set out to kill. They were to kill nothing 
" outside the law." But all life not protected 
by law might be sacrificed. I remember that a 
rabbit counted five points, a squirrel four, a 
hawk six, a blue jay two, and so on. The side 
that lost out on " points," or, in other words, de- 
stroyed the least life, was compelled to furnish 
the supper. How I did slaughter! When I 
came in to the " count " that night, my game- 
bag was filled to the brim with dead things. 
Among other creatures I had killed seventeen 
blue jays ! Any wonder that Captain Kidd and 
his pals screamed over my head this morning? 



I BECOME A KILLER 41 

And yet good Christian people still regard 
with horror the day when pagan Rome burned 
the martyrs. 

My education in the art of destruction in- 
creased as my years grew in number. I was 
not alone. All the human world was destroy- 
ing, just as it is destroying to-day. We moved 
back to the little city of Owosso, in Michigan, 
where I was born. In Erie County, Ohio, my 
nickname had been Slippery — just why I don't 
know; now, in Michigan, it became Nimrod and 
Wildcat Jim. I haunted our beautiful Shiawas- 
see River as ghosts are now haunting some of 
our scientific writers. I trapped and hunted and 
fished more than I studied — so much more, in 
fact, that I became decidedly unpopular with 
our high-school principal, Mr. Austin, who is 
now my very good friend. At last, I stood at 
the splitting of the ways — and I chose my own 
course. I trapped a season, and, with the 
money earned, started in on a special course at 
the University of Michigan. Things went 
well. I slipped through college with the 
ease of an eel, took up newspaper work in 
Detroit, became a special writer and a magazine 
writer and the youngest metropolitan news- 
paper editor in Michigan. I felt inclined 



42 GOD'S COUNTRY 

to believe that I was a wild and uproarious 
success. 

But under it all burned my desire to get back 
to my old job of destruction, and this desire led 
me into my long years of adventuring into the 
far northern wildernesses. 

As I sit here now, clicking my typewriter in 
the still heart of the forest, it is a wonder to 
me that some colossal spirit of vengeance does 
not rise up out of it and destroy me. And yet, 
when I consider, I know why that vengeance 
does not come — and in the face of this " great 
reason," I see my littleness as I have never 
seen it before. It is because, very slowly, my 
egoism is crumbling away. And as it crumbles, 
my big brother — all nature — grips my hand 
ever more closely, and whispers to me to tell 
others something of what I have found. And 
that big brother is not only the spirit of the 
heart-beating things about me, but also the spirit 
and voice of the trees, of the living earth that 
throbs under my feet, of the flowers, the sun, 
the sky. It is all reaching out to me with a 
great show of friendliness, and I seem to feel 
that fear and misunderstanding have slipped 
away from between us. It is inviting m£ to 
accept of it all that I may require, yet to cherish 



I BECOME A KILLER 43 

that which I cannot use. It is telling me, as it 
has whispered to me a thousand times before, 
the secret of life ; that the life in my own breast 
and all this that is about me are one and the 
same — and that, in our partnership for happi- 
ness, we each belong to the other. And there 
must be no desire for vengeance between us. 

Yet, to me, it does not seem like justice, look- 
ing at it from the warped and narrow point of 
view of my human mind. It is the human in- 
stinct to demand an eye for an eye and a tooth 
for a tooth. And I cannot see why my God of 
nature should give me such reward of peace 
and friendship after what I have done. It has 
always been my logic that life is the cheapest 
thing in existence. There is just so much earth, 
so much water, so much air about us; but of life 
there is no end. So we go on destroying. If 
nature would keep this destroyed life unto her- 
self for a few generations, instead of giving it 
back to us in her unvengeful way, the earth 
would soon become a desert. Then we would 
learn our lesson. 

I am thinking, as I write this, of a beautiful 
little forest in a wonderful valley in the heart 
of the British Columbia mountains. It was a 
glorious thing to look down upon that day when 



44 GOD'S COUNTRY 

I destroyed it. I call it a forest, though there 
was not more than an acre of it, or two at the 
most. And the valley was really a " pocket " 
among the mighty peaks of the Firepan Range. 
It was of balsams and cedars, rich green, and 
densely thick — a marvelous patch of living 
tapestry, vibrant with the glow and pulse of life 
in the sunset of that day. Into its shelter we 
had driven a wounded grizzly which had re- 
fused to turn and fight. And so thick and pro- 
tecting was the heart of it that we could not get 
the grizzly out. Night was not far away, and in 
its darkness we knew our game would escape us. 
And the thought came to us to burn that little 
paradise of green. There was no danger of a 
spreading fire. The mountain walls of the 
" pocket " would prevent that. And it was I 
who struck the match ! 

In twenty minutes, the little forest was a sea 
of writhing, leaping flame. It cried out and 
moaned in the agony of conflagration. The 
bear fled from its torture and its ruin, and we 
killed him. That night, the moon shone down 
on a black and smoldering mass of ruin where 
a little while before had been the paradise. 

In our camp, we laughed and exulted. The 
egoism of man made us feel our false triumph. 



I BECOME A KILLER 45 

What it had taken a thousand years to place in 
that cup of the mountains we had destroyed in 
half an hour — yet we felt no regret. We had 
destroyed a thousand times more life than filled 
our own pitiable bodies, yet did the false ethics 
of our breed assure us that we had done no 
wrong — simply because the life we had de- 
stroyed had not possessed a form and tongue 
like our own. 

" This man must be losing his reason," I hear 
some of my readers say. Is it that, or is a bit 
of reason just returning to me, after a million 
years of sleep? If it is madness, it is of a kind 
that would comfort the world could all be mad 
as I am mad. Life is Life. It is a spark of the 
same Supreme Power, whether in a tree, a 
flower, or a thing of flesh and blood. To me, 
as I view it now, the wanton destruction of that 
little paradise was as tragic as the destruction 
of life carried about on two legs or four. I 
feel that the crime of its destruction was as 
great as that of another day which I recall most 
vividly in these moments. 

I was in another wonderland of the northern 
mountains, and my companion was a grizzled 
old hunter who had learned the art of killing 
through a lifetime of experience. With our 



46 GOD'S COUNTRY 

pack-outfit of seven horses, we were hitting for 
the Yukon over a trail never traveled by white 
man before. So glorious was the valley we 
were in on this day of which I write that at 
noon we struck our camp. So awesome was the 
vastness and beauty of it that my soul was held 
spellbound with the magic of it. On all sides 
of us rose the mighty mountains, with snow- 
crowned peaks rising here and there out of the 
towering ranges. The murmur of rippling 
water filled the soft air with soothing song; 
green meadows, sweet with the perfume of wild 
hyacinths, violets, and a hundred other flowers, 
carpeted the rich earth about us; on the sun- 
warmed rocks, whistlers lay in fat contentment, 
calling to one another like small boys whistling 
between their teeth; the slopes were dotted with 
ptarmigan; a pair of eagles soared high above 
us, and from the patches and fingers of timber 
came the cry and song of birds. With my back 
propped against a pile of saddles and pan- 
niers I carefully scanned the slides and slopes 
through my hunting-glasses. High up on the 
crag of a mountain-shoulder, I picked up a 
nanny-goat feeding with her kid. Still farther 
away, on a green " slide " at least two miles 
from camp, I discovered five mountain-sheep 



I BECOME A KILLER 47 

lying down. And after that, swinging my 
glasses slowly, I came to something which sent 
a thrill through my blood. It was a mile away, 
a great, slow-moving hulk that I might have 
mistaken, for a rock had my eyes not been 
trained to the ways and movement of game. It 
was a grizzly. 

Alone I went after him, armed with man's 
deadliest weapon of extinction, a .405 Win- 
chester. Inside of half an hour I was well in 
the teeth of the breeze coming up the valley, 
and almost within gunshot of my victim. I 
came to a coulee and crept up that, and when 
I reached the table-land meadow where it be- 
gan, a thousand feet above the valley, I found 
myself within a hundred yards of the grizzly. 

He was digging like a dog for a gopher. And, 
then, suddenly, my heart gave a thump that 
almost choked me. In a twist of the mountain- 
bench, not more than seventy or eighty yards 
above me, were two more grizzlies. I hesi- 
tated, and looked back down the coulee, for a 
moment doubtful whether to retreat or de- 
clare war. Then I decided. In my hands was 
a killer of the deadliest and surest kind. I was 
an expert shot and my nerves were steady. I 
began. I think I fired five shots in perhaps 



48 GOD'S COUNTRY 

thirty seconds, and the three big grizzlies died 
almost in their tracks. A conqueror returning 
in his triumph to old Rome could not have been 
more elated than I. I remember that I leaped 
and danced and shrieked out at the top of my 
voice in the direction of camp. I was mad with 
joy. Three thousand pounds of flesh and blood 
lay hot and lifeless under my eyes, and I, the 
human near-god, with my own two insignificant 
hands and a mechanical thing, had taken the 
life from it! 

I sat down on one of the huge carcasses that 
still breathed under me. I wiped my face, and 
my blood was running a race that heated me as 
if with fire. And the thought came to me : 
" Oh, if the world could only see me now — here 
in my glorious triumph — with these great beasts 
about me ! " For it was a mighty triumph for 
man, the egoist. In thirty seconds I had de- 
stroyed a possible one hundred years of throb- 
bing, heart-beating life, a hundred years of win- 
ter, a hundred years of summer, a hundred 
mating-seasons, and the thousand other lives 
that now would never be born ! I stood up, and 
shrieked again toward the camp, and far above 
me out of the blue of the sky I heard an answer- 
ing cry from one of the eagles. . . . 



I BECOME A KILLER 49 

Yes, as I sit here, looking back over the days 
that are gone, I wonder that the spirit of 
vengeance does not rise up out of the forest and 
destroy me, even as I have destroyed. It would 
be justice, according to that justice which man 
the egoist metes out. And yet, even as I 
wonder, the answer comes to me very clearly. 
I am no different than hundreds of millions of 
others. I have destroyed in my own way, whrie 
others have destroyed in theirs. And nature, 
the most blessed of all things, is not vengeful. 
God forgives. And nature is God. It is God 
that lives in the rose, in the violet, in the tree, 
just as he lives in the heart of man. It is God 
that breathes in the grass which makes the earth 
sweet to tread upon, and it is God that lives in 
the song of birds. His " life " is all-encompass- 
ing, the vital spark of all existent things. In- 
stead of sending ghosts back to earth to prove 
his power, he gives us all these things, and lives 
and breathes in them, that we may have him 
with us in physical things all the days of our 
lives if we will only rise out of our egoism — 
and understand. 

And now I have come again to the parting 
of a way. I have bared the black side of my 
ledger, and it has not been pleasant work for 



50 GOD'S COUNTRY 

me. To-morrow begins the joyous part of 
my task — the beginning of that story which 
will tell how at last my eyes were opened, how 
understanding came to me, and with that under- 
standing a new faith which will live with me 
through all the rest of the years of my life. 



The Third Trail 
MY BROTHERHOOD 



The Third Trail 

MY BROTHERHOOD 

/ T" S O-DAY is Sunday, and I have just re- 
■*■ turned from a week's hike up the mys- 
terious little creek that runs past my cabin. It 
seems good to be home again, and Nuts and 
Spoony and Wild Bill, the blue jay, have given 
me a royal welcome, and I am almost convinced 
my pop-eyed moose-bird friends are trying to 
tell me who was the thief in my cabin while I 
was gone. On that " to-morrow " when I had 
promised myself another day of writing, the 
Wanderlust came to me, and I packed up a kit 
and a week's supply of grub and started out to 
explore my creek. It is a very individual sort of 
creek— it has character, even, if it hasn't a 
name. It comes out of deep, dark, and unex- 
plored masses of forest to the north, and I 
have fancied it bringing down all sorts of ro- 
mance and tragedy out of the hidden places if 
it could only talk. So I went to the end of it to 
find out its secrets for myself. And there was 

53 



54 GOD'S COUNTRY 

so much of interest that I could fill a book with 
it. I don't think any other white feet have ever 
traveled up this creek, which I now call " Lone- 
some." Surely not even an Indian has been 
along it for at least a generation, for I did not 
find the mark of an ax or sign of a fire or ves- 
tige of deadfall or trap-house. 

But it did take me forty miles back into a 
country of such savage wilderness and dense 
forests that I have almost determined to build 
me another cabin there a little later, if for no 
other reason than to live for a while with the 
hundreds of owls that inhabit certain parts of it. 
I have never seen so many owls anywhere in the 
Northland, and I figure this is because the big 
snow-shoe rabbits have been multiplying for 
several years past, and now exist there literally 
in thousands. At many places along the creek, 
the earth was beaten hard by their furred feet. 
By all the signs, I have predicted that next 
year, or the year after, the " seven-year rabbit- 
plague " will come along and kill off ninety out 
of every hundred. Then the owls will scatter, 
and most of the lynxes and foxes and wolves will 
wander off into other hunting grounds, for the 
rabbit is the staff of life of the flesh-eating 
birds and beasts of the big northern forests, just 



MY BROTHERHOOD 55 

as all the world over wheat is the mainstay of 
human stomachs. 

But I am wandering a bit from the point in 
mind — which is to say that, in leaving on my 
journey of exploration, I forgot to close the 
window of my cabin, and through that open win- 
dow entered the rascally thief whom the pair of 
moose-birds are trying to tell me about. I 
think Bill knows also, but I don't believe he 
would give a brother robber away, even if he 
did have four feet and a tail. By tracks and 
two or three other signs, I know the thief is a 
wolverine, who, like the pack-rat over in the 
mountains, steals almost entirely for the fun of 
it. This mischief-making humorist, among 
other things, has carried away a hat, one of 
my two frying-pans, several tins, half a slab of 
bacon, and my favorite fish-cleaning knife dur- 
ing my absence. But I know this clever fel- 
low's ways, and have hope that I shall soon 
recover my property if I keep my eyes open and 
listen with both my ears. 

And I shall not kill him, no matter how red- 
handed — or red-footed — I catch him. A few 
years ago, I would have planned to ambush him 
with a rifle. But now I have the desire to 
become as Intimate with him as possible and 



$6 GOD'S COUNTRY 

learn a little more definitely what he wants with 
a knife, a skillet, and my pans. I feel that, for 
his theft, he should in some way be rewarded 
and not slain, for he has added to my interest 
in life by rousing a keen and harmless curi- 
osity. His is only one way in which nature is 
constantly adding fullness of life and greater 
contentment to my years. Everywhere, even 
to the smallest things under my feet and at my 
hand, I am learning more and more of the mar- 
velous ways and life of all creation, and the 
more I learn the more I am convinced that 1 am 
simply an atom in its vast brotherhood, and I 
am finding a great happiness by making myself 
actually a part of it. 

Heretofore, I have been a self-expatriated 
spark of life, so to speak; in my human egoism, 
I have held myself apart from all other sparks 
of life that were not formed in my own poor 
and unlovely shape — and, even then, I con- 
sidered myself considerably better than those 
who did not happen to be of my particular color 
and breed. 

Two very simple things are adding to my 
pleasure in life this early afternoon, and illus- 
trate the point I have in mind — if one can bow 
one's head down to the level of understanding. 



MY BROTHERHOOD 57 

I am writing again between the two big spruce 
trees, but during my week of absence other 
sparks of life have, in a way, taken possession 
of my table. From between two of the hewn 
saplings that form the top of this table, where 
the big storm of wind must have flung a bit of 
earth and a seed, a tender green sprout of some- 
thing has started to grow. It is a single spear 
now, not of grass, and its green is the whitish 
green of the lower part of an asparagus shoot. 
To me, it seems fairly to pulse with life, and I 
have the very foolish feeling within me that 
nature planned this little surprise for me while 
I was away, and that, if I give it a bit of 
brotherly attention, I am going to have a flower 
on my table, not transplanted or plucked, but 
there deliberately through friendship for me. 
However foolish this notion may be, it is a very 
pleasant one to have, and its effect is to bring 
me much nearer to the Creator of things than 
any sermon I could hear preached from a pul- 
pit; for I am not listening merely to words 
about God, but I am looking directly aj, a 
physical part of God, and I find a great satis- 
faction in this faith. 

A second interesting thing that has happened 
to my table is that it has become a plain across 



58 GOD'S COUNTRY 

which now runs the trail of a big tribe of ants. 
These ants, I have found, climb up the farthest 
right-hand support of my table and proceed 
straight across to the big spruce on my left, up 
which they disappear; and a returning file of 
the workers come down the spruce and hit it 
" crosscountry " to the table-leg again. They 
don't seem to be bearing any burdens, yet they 
move with precision and purpose, and I have 
come to understand that, when ants move in 
this way, they have something very definite in 
mind. I am convinced they are moving from 
one fortress home to another, or at least that 
every " working " individual in the tribe is per- 
sonally investigating some new discovery that 
has been made either up the spruce or in the 
direction of the creek. Later, I will know more 
about it. 

But the point that impresses itself upon me 
most is that, in my destroying days, I would 
have swept the friendly little green sprout from 
its cradle, and would have driven the ant tribe 
from my property, destroying as many of them 
as possible. Again I want to emphasize that 
I am not a crank, or narrow-minded in my re- 
ligion of " live and let live." If this same tribe 
of ants had invaded my cabin, and were preying 



MY BROTHERHOOD 59 

on things necessary to me, I would destroy them 
or drive them away. That is my nature-given 
privilege — to protect myself and what is mine. 
It is also the privilege of every other spark of 
life. These same ants, were I to stand on their 
fortress, would attack me desperately. But now 
they do not molest me. And I do not molest 
them. It is the beautiful law of " live and let 
live " — so long as the necessity for destruction 
does not arise. 

When I sat down at my typewriter an hour 
ago, I had planned to begin immediately the 
telling of what I have wandered somewhat 
away from — the story of a few incidents which 
helped to bring about my own regeneration, and 
which at last impressed upon me this great 
Golden Rule of all nature — live and let live. 
The big dramatic climax in that part of my life 
happened over in the British Columbia moun- 
tains, where my love of adventure has taken me 
on many long journeys. 

But the change had begun to work in me be- 
fore then. My conscience was already stab- 
bing me. I was regretting, in a mild sort of 
way, that I had killed so much. But I was still 
the supreme egoist, believing myself the God- 
chosen animal of all creation, and when at any 



6o GOD'S COUNTRY 

time I withheld my destroying hand, I flattered 
myself with a thought of my condescension and 
human kindness. 

At the particular time I am going to write 
about, I was on a big grizzly-hunt in a wild 
and unhunted part of the British Columbia 
mountains. I had with me one man, seven 
horses, and a pack of Airedales trained to hunt 
bear. We had struck a grizzly-and-caribou 
paradise, and there had been considerable kill- 
ing, when, one day, we came upon the trail of 
Thor, the great beast that showed me how small 
in soul and inclination a man can be. In a 
patch of mud his feet had left tracks that were 
fifteen inches from tip to tip, and so wide and 
deep were the imprints that I knew I had come 
upon the king of all his kind. I was alone that 
morning, for I had left camp an hour ahead 
of my man, who was two or three miles behind 
me with four of the horses and the Airedale 
pack. I went on watching for a new camp- 
site, for the thrill of a great desire possessed 
me — the desire to take the life of this monster 
king of the mountains. It was in these moments 
that the unexpected happened. I came over a 
little rise, not expecting that my bear was within 
two or three miles of me, when something that 



MY BROTHERHOOD 61 

was very much like a low and sullen rumble 
of far-away thunder stopped the blood in my 
veins. 

Ahead of me, on the edge of a little wallow 
of mud, stood Thor. He had smelled me, and, 
I believe, it was the first time he had ever 
smelled the scent of man. Waiting for this 
new mystery in the air, he had reared himself 
up until the whole nine feet of him rested on 
his haunches, and he sat like a trained dog, 
with his great forefeet, heavy with mud, droop- 
ing in front of his chest. He was a monster in 
size, and his new June coat shone a golden 
brown in the sun. His forearms were al- 
most as large as a man's body, and the three 
largest of his five knifelike claws were five and 
a half inches long. He was fat and sleek and 
powerful. His upper fangs, sharp as stiletto- 
points, were as long as a man's thumb, and be- 
tween his great jaws he could have crushed the 
neck of a caribou. I did not take in all these 
details in the first startling moments ; one by one 
they came to me later. But 1 had never looked 
upon anything in life quite so magnificent. Yet 
did I have no thought of sparing that splendid 
life. Since that day, I have rested in camp with 
my head pillowed on the arm of a living grizzly 



62 GOD'S COUNTRY 

that weighed a thousand pounds. Friendship 
and love and understanding have sprung up be- 
tween us. But in that moment my desire was to 
destroy this life that was so much greater than 
my own. My rifle was at my saddle-horn in 
its buckskin jacket. I fumbled it in getting into 
action, and in those precious moments Thor 
lowered himself slowly and ambled away. I 
fired twice, and would have staked my life that 
I had missed both times. Not until later did I 
discover that one of my bullets had opened a 
furrow two inches deep and a foot long in the 
flesh of Thor's shoulder. Yet I did not see 
him flinch. He did not turn back, but went his 
way. 

Shame burns within me as I write of the 
days that followed; and yet, with that shame, 
there is a deep and abiding joy, for they were 
also the days of my regeneration. Day and 
night, my one thought was to destroy the big 
grizzly. We never left his trail. The dogs 
followed him like demons. Five times in the 
first week we came within long shooting-range, 
and twice we hit him. But still he did not wait 
for us or attack us. He wanted to be left alone. 
In that week, he killed four of the dogs, and 
the others we tied up to save them. We trailed 



MY BROTHERHOOD 63 

him with horses and afoot, and never did the 
spoor of other game lure me aside. The de- 
sire to kill him became a passion in me. He 
outgeneraled us. He beat all our games of 
trickery. But I knew that we were bound to 
win — that he was slowly weakening because of 
exhaustion, and the sickness of his wounds. We 
loosed the dogs again, and another was killed. 

Then, at last, came that splendid day when 
Thor, master of the mountains, showed me how 
contemptible was I — with my human shape and 
soul. 

It was Sunday. I had climbed three or four 
thousand feet up the side of a mountain and 
below me lay the wonder of the valley, dotted 
with patches of trees and carpeted with the 
beauty of rich, green grass, mountain-violets 
and forget-me-nots, wild asters, and hyacinths. 
On three sides of me spread out the wonderful 
panorama of the Canadian Rockies, softened in 
the golden sunshine of late June. From up and 
down the valley, from the breaks between the 
peaks, and from the little gullies cleft in shale 
and rock that crept up to the snow-lines came a 
soft and droning murmur. It was the music of 
running water — music ever in the air of sum- 
mer, for the rivers and creeks and tiny stream- 



64 GOD'S COUNTRY 

lets gushing down from the melting snow up 
near the clouds are never still. Sweet perfumes 
as well as music came to me; June and July — ■ 
the last of spring and the first of summer in 
the northern mountains — were commingling. 
All the earth was bursting with green; flowers 
were turning the sunny slopes and meadows into 
colored splashes of red and white and purple, 
and everything that had life was giving voice 
to exultation — the fat whistlers on their rocks, 
the pompous little gophers on their mounds, the 
squirrel-like rock-rabbits, the big bumblebees 
that buzzed from flower to flower, the hawks in 
the valley, and the eagles over the peaks. 

Earth, it seemed, was at peace. 

And I, looking over all that vastness of life, 
felt my own greatness thrust upon me. 

For had not the Creator, of all things, made 
this wonderland for me? 

There could be no denial. I was masters- 
master because I could think, because I could 
reason, because I held the reins to an unutter- 
able power of destruction. And then the vast- 
ness of time seized upon me like a living thing. 
Yesterday, a thing had happened which came 
strongly into my thoughts of to-day. Under a 
great overhanging cliff I had found a part of 



MY BROTHERHOOD 65 

a monster bone, as heavy as iron — a section of 
a gigantic vertebra. Two years before I had 
found part of the skeleton of a prehistoric 
creature, identical with this, and, from photo- 
graphs which I took of it the scientific depart- 
ments of the University of Michigan and the 
government at Ottawa agreed that the bones 
were part of the skeleton of a mammoth whale 
that once had swum where the valleys and peaks 
of the Rocky Mountains now disrupt the con- 
tinent. 

And on this Sunday, looking down, I thought 
of the monster bone I had found yesterday in 
the dry shale and sand under the cliff. When 
the Three Wise Men saw the star in the east, 
that bone was as I had found it. It was there 
when Christ was born. It was there, unmoved 
and untouched, before Rome was founded, be- 
fore Troy died in the mists of the past, before 
history, as we know history, began. It was 
there a million years ago, ten million, fifty, a 
hundred. And, thinking of this, I felt myself 
growing smaller and smaller; my egoism died 
away, and I saw these mountains obliterated 
and under the blue of a vast ocean, and rising 
out of that ocean I saw other continents, peo- 
pled with other people, moved by other reli- 



66 GOD'S COUNTRY 

gions, beating to the pulse of other civilizations 
long dead. I heard the beat of waves below 
me, where grew the grass and the flowers of the 
valley. And the droning music of that valley 
seemed to change into the low whisperings of 
countless trillions of men and women and little 
children who had lived and died in those other 
civilizations of the lost ages; and that fancied 
whispering of dead worlds told me a great 
truth — that the Supreme Arbiter of things had 
watched over all those trillions just as he was 
now watching over me, that I was but a piti- 
fully small grain of dust in the great scheme of 
things, that my egoism was criminal, sacrile- 
gious, a curse set upon myself by myself. And 
the soft and droning whisper also told me the 
time would come when my own " civilization " 
would be obliterated, to be followed by a hun- 
dred, a thousand, or a million others, each in 
its turn to live and die. 

And it was then, on that Sunday precious to 
me, that I asked myself an old, old question in 
a great, new way — " What is God? " 

And looking down into the valley, and up into 
the sky, understanding came to me. God is 
there, and there, and there. He is the Infinite 
Power. He is Life. Life began infinities ago, 



MY BROTHERHOOD 67 

and it will continue through other infinities. 
While we are squabbling among ourselves with 
our little religions and our little views, while 
we are preaching the damnation of beliefs that 
are not ours, while sects fight to convert sects 
that do not think as they think, while our nar- 
row-gage minds travel in their narrow-gage 
paths, — that Infinite Power is watching and 
waiting, as it has watched and waited from the 
beginning, and as it will watch and wait until 
the end. And I stared down into the valley, 
green and glorious and filled with sunshine and 
peace, and that low-sung whisper seemed to 
say, " If this is not God what is God? " And 
then also, in a new way, came something in my 
brain which said to me, "And who are you?" 

I climbed higher up the mountain. I felt 
my greatness gone. Kindly, something had told 
me how pitiful I was. 1 was not mighty. I 
was no more in the ultimate of things than a 
blade of grass. My egoism, on that glorious 
Sunday, began to crumble in my soul. And 
then, by chance if you will have it so, came the 
climax of that day. 

I came to a sheer wall of rock that rose hun- 
dreds of feet above me. Along this ran a 



68 GOD'S COUNTRY 

narrow ledge, and I followed it. The passage 
became craggy and difficult, and in climbing 
over a broken mass of rock, I slipped and fell. 
I had brought a light mountain-gun with me, 
and in trying to recover myself I swung it about 
with such force that the stock struck a sharp 
edge of rock and broke clean off. But I had 
saved myself from possible death, and was in 
a frame of mind to congratulate myself rather 
than curse my luck. Fifty feet farther on I 
came to a " pocket " in the cliff, where the ledge 
widened until, at this particular place, it was 
like a flat table twenty feet square. Here I sat 
down, with my back to the precipitous wall, and 
began to examine my broken rifle. 

I laid it beside me, useless. Straight up at 
my back rose the sheer face of the mountain; 
in front of me, had I leaped from the ledge, 
my body would have hurtled through empty air 
for a thousand feet. In the valley I could see 
the creek, like a ribbon of shimmering silver; 
two or three miles away was a little lake; on 
another mountain I saw a bursting cascade of 
water leaping down the heights and losing itself 
in the velvety green of the lower timber. For 
many minutes, new and strange thoughts pos- 
sessed me. I did not look through my hunting- 



MY BROTHERHOOD 69 

glasses, for I was no longer seeking game. My 
blood was stirred, but not with the desire to 
kill. 

And then, suddenly, there came a sound to 
my ears that seemed to stop the beating of my 
heart. I had not heard it until it was very 
near — approaching along the narrow ledge. 

It was the click, — click, — click of claws rat- 
tling on rock! 

I did not move. I hardly breathed. And 
out from the ledge I had followed came a mon- 
ster bear ! 

With the swiftness of lightning, I recognized 
him. It was Thor ! And, in that same instant, 
the great beast saw me. 

In thirty seconds I lived a lifetime, and ill 
those thirty seconds what passed through my 
mind was a thousand times swifter than spoken 
word. A great fear rooted me, and yet in 
that fear I saw everything to the minutest de- 
tail. Thor's massive head and shoulders were 
fronting me. 1 saw the long naked scar where 
my bullet had plowed through his shoulder; I 
saw another wound in his fore leg, still ragged 
and painful, where another of my soft-nosed 
bullets had torn like an explosion of dynamite. 
The giant grizzly was no longer fat and sleek 



70 GOD'S COUNTRY 

as I had first seen him ten days ago. All that 
time he had been fighting for his life; he was 
thinner; his eyes were red; his coat was dull 
and unkempt from lack of food and strength. 
But at that distance, less than ten feet from me, 
he seemed still a mighty brother of the moun- 
tains themselves. As I sat stupidly, stunned to 
the immobility of a rock in my hour of doom, 
I felt the overwhelming conviction of what had 
happened. Thor had followed me along the 
ledge, and, in this hour of vengeance and 
triumph, it was I, and not the great beast, who 
was about to die. 

It seemed to me that an eternity passed in 
these moments. And Thor, mighty in his 
strength, looked at me and did not move. And 
this thing that he was looking at, — shrinking 
against the rock, — was the creature that had 
hunted him; this was the creature that had hurt 
him, and it was so near that he could reach out 
with his paw and crush it ! And how weak and 
white and helpless it looked now! What a piti- 
ful, insignificant thing it was ! Where was its 
strange thunder? Where was its burning light- 
ning? Why did it make no sound? 

Slowly Thor's giant head began swinging 
from side to side; then he advanced — just one 



MY BROTHERHOOD 71 

step — and in a slow, graceful movement reared 
himself to his full, magnificent height. For 
me, it was the beginning of the end. And in 
that moment, doomed as I was, I found no pity 
for myself, Here, at last, was justice ! I was 
about to die. I, who had destroyed so much of 
life, found how helpless I was when I faced life 
with my naked hands. And it was justice! I 
had robbed the earth of more life than would 
fill the bodies of a thousand men, and now my 
own life was to follow that which I had de- 
stroyed. Suddenly fear left me. I wanted to 
cry out to that splendid creature that I was 
sorry, and could my dry lips have framed the 
words, it would not have been cowardice — but 
truth. 

I have read many stories of truth and hope 
and faith and charity. From a little boy, my 
father tried to teach me what it meant to be a 
gentleman, and he lived what he tried to teach. 
And from the days of my small boyhood, 
mother told me stories of great and good men 
and women, and in the days of my manhood, 
she faithfully lived the great truth that of all 
precious things charity and love are the most 
priceless. Yet had I accepted it all in the 
narrowest and littlest way. Not until this hour 



72 GOD'S COUNTRY 

on the edge of the cliff did I realize how small 
can be the soul of a man buried in his egoism — 
or how splendid can be the soul of a beast. 

For Thor knew me. That I know. He knew 
me as the deadliest of all his enemies on the 
face of the earth. Yet until I die will I believe 
that, in my helplessness, he no longer hated me 
or wanted my life. For slowly he came down 
upon all fours again, and, limping as he went, 
he continued along the ledge— and left me to 
live! 

I am not, in these days, sacrilegious enough 
to think that the Supreme Power picked my poor 
insignificant self from among a billion and a 
half other humans especially to preach a sermon 
to that glorious Sunday on the mountainside. 
Possibly it was all mere chance. It may be 
that another day Thor would have killed me 
in my helplessness. It may all have been a 
lucky accident for me. Personally, I do not be- 
lieve it, for I have found that the soul of the 
average beast is cleaner of hate and of malice 
than that of the average man. But whether 
one believes with me or not, does not matter, 
so far as the point 1 want to make is con- 
cerned — that from this hour began the great 



MY BROTHERHOOD 73 

change in me, which has finally admitted me into 
the peace and joy of universal brotherhood 
with Life. It matters little how a sermon or a 
great truth comes to one; it is the result that 
counts. 

I returned down the mountain, carrying my 
broken gun with me. And everywhere I saw 
that things were different. The fat whistlers, 
big as woodchucks, were no longer so many 
targets, watching me cautiously from the rock- 
tops; the gophers, sunning themselves on their 
mounds, meant more to me now than a few 
hours ago. I looked off to a distant slide on 
another mountain and made out the half-dozen 
sheep 1 had studied through my glasses earlier 
in the day. But my desire to kill was gone. I did 
not realize the fullness of the change that was 
upon me then. In a dull sort of way, I accepted 
it as an effect of shock, perhaps as a passing 
moment of repentance and gratitude because of 
my escape. I did not tell myself that I would 
never kill sheep again except when mutton was 
necessary to my camp fire. I did not promise 
the whistlers long lives. And yet the change 
was on me, and growing stronger in my blood 
with every breath I drew. The valley was dif- 
ferent. Its air was sweeter. Its low song of 



74 GOD'S COUNTRY 

life and running waters and velvety winds whis- 
pering between the mountains was new inspira- 
tion to me. The grass was softer under my 
feet; the flowers were more beautiful; the earth 
itself held a new thrill for me. 

A few nights later, beside a small fire we 
had built in the cool of evening, I tried to tell 
old Donald something about the Transfigura- 
tion, how Christ had gone up on the mount with 
Peter and John and James, and what had hap- 
pened there. 

11 It wasn't that Christ himself was actu- 
ally changed as he prayed on the mountain- 
top," I said to Donald. " The change was in 
Peter and John and James, who in these mo- 
ments saw Christ with a new vision and a new 
understanding. The Transfiguration was sim- 
ply a mental process of their own; they saw 
clearly now where before they had been half 
blind. And I am wondering if this old world 
of ours wouldn't change for us in the same way 
if we saw it with understanding, and looked at 
it with clean eyes? " 

So, on this other Sunday, as the evening 
draws on, I look back through the years be- 



MY BROTHERHOOD 75 

tween me and that day on the mountain-top, and 
the memory of Thor fills a warm corner of my 
heart. Through him I have the happy thought 
that I was given birth into a new world, and all 
things now hold a new significance for me. I 
have discovered for myself, in a small way, 
the wonderful secret of the instinctive processes 
of nature, and in a thousand ways I have found 
this instinct, coming directly from the fount of 
supreme direction, far more amazing than rea- 
soning itself. I understand more clearly, I 
think, why all humanity loves a baby, no matter 
how ugly it may be. It is because it is so utterly 
dependent upon instinct alone, so completely 
helpless, so absolutely without reason or pro- 
tection of its own. We like to believe that a 
baby is very close to God, simply because it has 
no reasoning and because it is as yet purely 
a creature of instinctive processes. And yet, as 
we lay down our lives for its protection, we for- 
get that adult man, with all his reasoning and 
his power, was originally a creature of instinct 
himself. We forget that it took millions of 
years to give him a language, and that posses- 
sion of language alone has made him a super- 
creature. For it is language that gives birth to 
reason, allows of communication of thought, 



76 GOD'S COUNTRY 

and should man be suddenly bereft of all lan- 
guage and thought-communication he would, in 
the course of ages, revert again into a creature 
guided solely by instinct. In that event he 
would be nothing more or less than a brother to 
all other creatures of instinct. He would again 
become an ordinary member of the Ancient 
Brotherhood of Common Heritage, and could 
no longer call himself the Chosen One and the 
Ordained of God. But good luck came to him, 
perhaps even in the days when he may have 
swung from the trees by his tail — good luck in 
the discovery of a crude method of thought- 
communication, a discovery that developed 
through the ages, until now his head is turned, 
so to speak, and for tens of thousands of years 
he has looked down more and more upon his 
poor relations who have not had his own good 
fortune. 

But I am learning that time has not freed 
him, and never will free him, from his blood 
relationship. And creed may follow creed, and 
religion may follow religion, but never will he 
find that full peace and contentment which might 
be his lot until he recognizes and admits into 
his comradeship again the soul of that nature 
which is his own mother, and forgets his monu- 



MY BROTHERHOOD 77 

mental egoism in a new understanding of those 
instinctive processes of nature through which 
he, himself, passed in the kindergarten of his 
own existence. 

This is my faith, my religion. Close to where 
I am sitting is an old stub, clothed in a mass 
of wood-vine, warm and vivid in the golden 
glow of the setting sun. The wood-vine has 
climbed, instinctively, to the top of the stub, 
and now, finding their support gone, half a 
dozen long tendrils are reaching out toward a 
tall young birch six or eight feet away. One 
tendril, stronger and older than the others, has 
reached and clasped the nearest branch. The 
others are following unerringly. Yet they have 
no eyes to see. No voice calls back to them to 
point out the way. It is the instinct of life it- 
self that is guiding them, the same instinct, in 
a smaller way, that dragged man up bit by bit 
from out of the black chaos of the past. In a 
thousand other ways, if one will take the blind- 
fold from his eyes and try to understand, he 
may see this mightiest of all the forces of the 
earth — instinct — a vibrant, breathing, strug- 
gling thing about him, a force so much more 
powerful than his own, so all-consuming and 
indestructible that it stands out as a giant moun- 



78 GOD'S COUNTRY 

tain compared with the mole-hill of his own 
littleness. In my own faith, I see it as a vast 
and inexhaustible reservoir of life, of strength, 
of " upward climb," of inspiration. I see it as 
the one great, all-necessary force of creation — 
a force more precious to man than all the mines 
of the earth, more precious than all the treasure 
of the mints, if he would forget his greatness 
and reach out his hands to it in the gladness 
of a new brotherhood. 

Dusk is falling. And, as I stop my work, 
here in the heart of a forest, I seem to see the 
smiles of many who will read this, and I seem 
to hear the low and unbelieving laughter of 
those who think themselves of the flesh and 
blood of God. And I seem to hear their voices 
saying: 

" He is wrong. Nature is beautiful — some- 
times. Also, it is crude. It is rough. It is 
destructive. It is, half the time, a pest. While 
we — we — have we not performed wonders? 
Have we not proved ourselves the chosen of 
God? Have we not created nations? Have 
we not built up great cities? Have we not ac- 
cumulated vast riches? Have we not invented 
the Dollar? Are we not, in a hundred ways, 
shackling nature as a man harnesses a horse, 



MY BROTHERHOOD 79 

proving ourselves its masters, and it our 
slave? " 

I hear — and then I hear another voice, and 
softly, distantly, it says: 

II Yea ! you are great — in your own eyes. 
You have made nations and cities and great 
tabernacles — and you have created the Dollar. 
But, when, for a moment, you cease the mad 
struggle you are making, you are afraid. Yes; 
you cry out loudly then in your fear. You fight 
to bring ghosts back, that they may tell you what 
happens when you lie down and die. You cry 
out for a religion which will give you absolute 
faith and comfort and cannot find it. You 
think you are great because you have built sky- 
scrapers and ride close to the clouds and have 
made it possible to rush swiftly through a coun- 
try choked with dust. But you forget quickly. 
You forget how little you were — yesterday. 
You do not tell yourself that you are a pest, per- 
haps the greatest of all. Yea; you are great, 
and in your greatness you are wise, but all that 
which you have achieved cannot give you that 
which you so vainly seek — the contentment of 
a deep and abiding faith." 



The Fourth Trail 
THE ROAD TO FAITH 



The Fourth Trail 

THE ROAD TO FAITH 

TT has been some time since I sat down to 
*■■ work at my table under the tall spruce trees. 
I have had an experience during the past five 
or six days which is one of my rewards for 
letting nature live, and, for a space, it quite 
completely upset me, so far as work was con- 
cerned. 

In other words, I have been having an ex- 
perience with a species of vermin which I love. 
The baby vermin of this particular species are, 
to me, almost as lovable and quite as cute in 
their ways as human babies; and for the adult 
vermin, the mothers and fathers of the babies, 
I have a far greater love and respect than I 
have for many males and females of my own 
breed. And, taking it all round, they are a 
cleaner, handsomer, and more wholesome- 
looking lot than the average crowd of humans, 
though they are — because of the mightiness of 
man's edict — nothing more than vermin. 

I am speaking of bears. A few years ago, 

83 



84 GOD'S COUNTRY 

one of my most thrilling sports was to hunt 
them — blacks, grizzlies, and polars. Now I 
consider them, in a way, my brothers, and I am 
having a lot of fun in the comradeship. I am 
filled with resentment when I consider that in 
all the states of this country, with the excep- 
tion of two or three, the law says these friends 
of mine are " vermin," along with lice and fleas 
and maggots, and that they may be killed on 
sight, babies and all, because, — perhaps once in 
his lifetime, — a bear living very close to civiliza- 
tion may make a meal of pig or lamb. If every 
human mother in the land could hold a baby 
cub in her arms for five minutes, there would 
be such an uprising of feminine sympathy that 
the laws would be repealed. 

In thinking again of our mothers, I would 
give a good year of my life if a million of them 
could have seen what I have seen during the 
past few days. For, after all, I believe that 
nearly all great movements toward better and 
bigger and more beautiful things must and will 
begin with women. No amount of " equality " 
will ever take that blessed superiority to men 
away from them. To-day, even religion, 
shameful to men as the fact may be, rests on 
a pillar of women's white shoulders, and all the 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 85 

faith that the world possesses first finds its 
resting-place in their soft breasts. And I look 
ahead to the day, with unbounded faith of my 
own, when women will see, and understand, and 
begin the great fight toward comradeship with 
all that other life which is so utterly dependent 
about them now — life which throbs and urges in 
every living thing from the grass-blade and the 
oak to the " instinct " creatures of flesh and 
blood. Then shall we have a " religion of na- 
ture, " with a force and a might behind it which 
will glorify the earth, and man will come to re- 
alize that he is not God, but only an insignifi- 
cantly small part of God's handiwork. And 
when man comes to that point, where he casts 
off his arrogance and his ego, then will the time 
have come for the birth of a satisfying and uni- 
versal faith in that great and all-embracing 
Power which we know and speak of in our own 
language as God. 

And the very foundation of this faith, I be- 
lieve, will be an understanding of all life, the 
acknowledgment at last that man himself may 
not be a more precious physical manifestation 
of the Supreme Vital Force than many of the 
other created things about him. 

It is because I believe that nature, the mother 



86 GOD'S COUNTRY 

of all life, is trying to teach us this great truth 
in a thousand or a million different ways, in the 
smoke and grime and crush of big cities as well 
as in farm-land and forest, that I come back 
to my little experience with the bears. 

About six or seven miles to the north of me is 
a great ridge, plainly visible from one of the 
halfway limbs of my lookout spruce, a sort of 
barrier which rises up between me and the still 
vaster hinterland beyond it. Sometime in the 
past, a fire swept over it, so that now it is cov- 
ered with a gorgeous and splendid growth of 
young birch and poplars, and virile patches of 
vines on which, a little later, there will be an 
abundance of strawberries, raspberries, rose- 
berries, and black currants. It is also richly 
sprinkled with mountain-ash trees, which give 
promise of a yield of hundreds of bushels of 
fruit this late summer and autumn. Altogether, 
it is an ideal feeding-range for wild things, 
hoof, claw, and feathers. Three times 1 have 
traveled for miles along the cap of this ridge. 
To me, in all its richness and promise, it is a 
glorious manifestation of Life. It breathes 
under me and about me. I can fairly hear its 
compelling youth bursting from its growing 
leaves, its swelling fruits, its flowers, and from 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 87 

the mold that pulses and throbs with the vital 
forces under my feet. I almost think I could 
live and die on this ridge, or another ridge like 
it, and never be at loss for company. 

On my first visit to the ridge, being overtaken 
by storm, I built me a brush shelter in a lovely 
spot close to it, with a tiny creek of spring-cold 
water not more than a dozen paces away. On 
my third and last visit, I returned to this spot, 
and ran face on into my adventure. 

From the sheltered bower of balsams where 
I had built my wigwam, I could look up a roll- 
ing, meadowy breast of the ridge, so perfect 
in its adornment of vine and bush and small 
clumps of young trees that, to one not entirely 
acquainted with the exquisite art of nature, it 
would almost seem as though a human land- 
scape-architect had " laid out " the little para- 
dise which was my hillside back yard. On this 
particular morning, coming up quietly, my eyes 
were greeted by an amazingly pretty spectacle. 
The green hillside, soft and velvety in the sun- 
light and shadow of the morning, was in full 
possession of two families of black bears. 

So close were the nearest of them to me that 
I dropped like a shot behind a big rock, and 
the breath of air that was stirring being in my 



'88 GOD'S COUNTRY 

favor, I was at a splendid vantage-point to take 
in the whole scene. Within forty yards of me 
were a mother and three cubs, and a little 
higher up — perhaps twice that distance — were 
a mother and two cubs. At almost the very 
crest of the ridge were two more bears, which I 
at first thought were adults, A closer inspection 
assured me they were last year's cubs, and pos- 
sibly not more than a third grown, though to 
which of the two mothers they belonged, if to 
either, I could not make up my mind. Fre- 
quently, instead of setting out in life for itself, 
a black bear cub will follow its mother through 
a second season, and I judged this to be the situ- 
ation here. 

For two hours, 1 did not move from my 
place of concealment. That spectacle of 
motherhood and babyhood on the hillside, with 
the virile and luxuriant life of nature pulsing 
and beating all about it, was a new chapter in 
my book of religion. It was pointing out to me, 
in perhaps a hundredth or a thousandth lesson, 
that all life is the same, and that it is only 
language, or the want of language, that makes 
the difference in the " life-relationship " of all 
created things. I could fancy, as I lay there, 
just how the Supreme Arbiter of things had 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 89 

given physical being to all this life that was 
about me, as well as the life that was in me. 
It has all come from the same dynamo, so to 
speak — a spark of it in each tree, a spark of it 
in each flower and shrub, and blade of grass, a 
spark of it in each of the beasts of flesh and 
blood on the hillside, and a spark of it in me. 
Our life was the same. It had all come from 
the same vital source, from the same supreme 
fount of existence. Yet how different were the 
forms it animated! Close to my hand was a 
beautiful rock-violet, blue as the sky, its velvety- 
petals freckled with tiny flecks of gold; a few 
yards away, perched among the rustling leaves 
of a birch, a brush-warbler filled the air with 
melody; back of me, the tops of the thick 
balsams whispered softly, and up there I could 
hear the grunting of the mother bears, the 
squealing of the little cubs, and a gentle mur- 
muring sound that came from the ridge itself, 
as if all living things were fighting for a lan- 
guage, struggling to give voice to something that 
was in them. 

I have had some amusement and a little dis- 
cord over the teapot tempests that so-called 
nature-scientists occasionally stir up among 
themselves over the " humanizing " of wild life. 



90 GOD'S COUNTRY 

Man's ego has possessed him so utterly that 
it is distasteful to him to concede anything 
" humanlike " to any creature that is not in his 
own flesh and form. For my part, loving all 
wild life as I do, I am proud and glad that it 
does not possess more of our human qualities. 
If I write honestly of what has come to me in 
my own wide experience in nature, I must — no 
matter how unpleasant the statement may be — i 
confess that wild life does possess a great many 
characteristics that are very " human," and the 
ways of its members are in many instances 
strangely the same. I could see little differ- 
ence between my bears on the hillside and two 
human mothers and their children, except in 
their physical appearance, and the fact that the 
humans would undoubtedly have made a great 
deal more noise. But the bears were hand- 
somer — begging the ladies' pardon. Their sleek 
coats shone like black satin in the sun, and the 
cubs were cute enough to hug to death. But 
they were a worry to their mothers for all that, 
and especially one of them, which appeared 
to be the hog-it-all member of the family near- 
est me. Whenever the mother bear pawed over 
a stone or pulled down a tender bush, this little 
customer was always there ahead of the rest of 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 91 

the family, licking up the choicest grubs and 
ants and getting the first mouthful of greens. 
Half a dozen times, the mother slapped him 
with her paw, rolling him over like a fat ball. 
But there could have been no very great cor- 
rective power in the cuffings, or else he was 
toughened to them by usage, for he was back 
on the job again without very much loss of 
time. 

For almost two hours, the bears fed on the 
hillside. Several times the two families drew so 
near together that the cubs intermingled and the 
mothers almost rubbed sides. I feel that the 
interest of this particular page would be greatly 
increased for many of my readers if I added a 
ferocious imaginary fight between the two 
mothers and a bloody feud between the young- 
sters. Bears do fight when they meet — some- 
times — just like humans, only not as often. But 
it is my duty to relate that these bears were at 
peace on this particular day, and that they 
seemed to enjoy the mutual companionship. It 
was all so fine that I had an impelling desire to 
go up on the hillside and become a comrade with 
them. When the feeding was over, and the 
cubs were wrestling and running about in play, 
I almost rose up from behind my rock to call 



92 GOD'S COUNTRY 

out my friendship to them. The lack of one 
thing held me back — that one thing which all 
nature is crying out for — a language. I feel 
they would have welcomed me could I have told 
them I was a friend, and wanted to play with 
them, and make them a present of some 
sugar. But instead of that this is what 
happened: 

In their play, two of the cubs had descended 
within twenty feet of my rock. One of these 
was the gourmand. Somehow, he lost his bal- 
ance, rolled over, and came tumbling down. 
When he stopped he was not more than half a 
dozen feet from me. As he brought his fat 
little body to its feet he saw me. His eyes 
fairly popped. It seemed to me that for a full 
minute he did not move or breathe. And dur- 
ing that same minute I remained as still as a 
rock. In his amazement and his wonder, he 
was the funniest thing I had ever seen, and in 
spite of myself, my face broke into a grin. In- 
stantly there came out of him a little, piggish 
grunt, — and he was off. Up that hillside he 
went as if the world was after him. He did not 
stop when he reached his mother and the other 
cubs, but seemed to hit it still faster for the 
top of the ridge. The mother looked after him, 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 93 

sniffed the air, and rose to her feet. In half a 
minute, she was lumbering after him, the two 
remaining cubs hustling ahead of her. 

A hundred yards away, the second mother 
bear took the warning. In a very short time, 
they had all disappeared over the cap of the 
ridge. I had not shown myself. I had made 
no sound. The wind was still in my favor. 
Yet the frightened cub had given warning to 
them all. For no other creature but man would 
they have fled like that. Even in the face of a 
pack of wolves, the mothers would have turned 
to fight. Something had told them that man 
was near — yet only the cub had seen and smelled 
that man, and he had probably never seen or 
smelled another. Yet he knew, and all the 
others knew, that man was the deadliest of all 
enemies. And I am half convinced, as I write 
this, that nature has at least the beginning of a 
universal language, that the centuries and hun- 
dreds of centuries have given it four words, and 
these words are: "Man is our enemy." I 
might fancy that the winds carry these words, 
that the tree-tops whisper them, that they are 
in the undertone of running waters, that all life 
outside of man and man's pitiably few friends 
has, in some strange way, come to learn them. 



94 GOD'S COUNTRY 

It is, I confess, an elusive sort of fancy, — but it 
sets one to thinking. 

It makes one wonder, for instance, why man 
is so jealous of himself. The Supreme Power 
is immeasurable, he tells himself. It has no 
such a thing as limitation. Heaven, no matter 
in what form he may conceive it, is utterly 
boundless. Yet he is jealous of it. He does 
not want to concede that any other life will 
form a part of it but that of his own breed. 
He has tried, through unnumbered centuries, to 
fool himself into the belief that he is the one 
and only thing in all creation upon which the 
Ruling Power of the universe has its guardian 
eye. He has tried to make himself believe that 
he is the one toad in the huge puddle of life. 
He has not conceded that an all-powerful but 
tender God might love flowers and birds and 
trees and many other living things as well as he 
loves man. And as I sit here under my spruce 
trees again, it seems to me that, just because he 
has been so near-sighted, man has not yet found 
a faith which is all-comforting and of which he 
is utterly sure. 

1 seem to see a very clear reason for this. In 
this age, though still fettered by his egoism, man 
is not utterly blind to his own deformities. As 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 95 

" civilization " progresses, he sees more and 
more what a monster he has been in the past, 
and what a monster in many ways he is to- 
day. He sees his breed committing every crime 
known to the ages, from petty larceny to world- 
slaughters that devastate nations. He sees 
everywhere the strong taking advantage of the 
weak. He sees millions go hungry and cold that 
a few may profit. In great convention-halls, he 
sees the " statesmen " that rule the destiny of a 
mighty nation cutting capers and acting gen- 
erally like a lot of silly little children. He 
sees every man in a great game fighting to see 
who can accumulate the most dollars, no matter 
at what cost to the others. He sees sickening 
and disgusting fads come and go. He looks on 
a world-brothel of iniquity, of discontent, of 
avarice and greed and butchery among men. 
Nowhere does he see the stability, the dignity, 
and the mighty forces of good that should walk 
hand in hand with " the chosen of God." 

He is beginning to see himself, at last, as a 
contemptible specimen of life — in spite of his 
brain and his inventions. 

He is beginning to understand that the most 
perfect airship his brain will ever conceive can- 
not take him to heaven. 



96 GOD'S COUNTRY 

He is beginning to realize that there is a thing 
greater than brain, greater than mechanical 
progress. 

And as he comes to understand more and 
more how imperfect a thing he is, the more un- 
stable his faith becomes; and the sacrilegious 
thought comes to him, unconsciously but with 
terrific force: " If I am the chosen handiwork 
of God, then I can have no very great faith in 
the judgment and workmanship of God." 

And as the suspicion grows upon him that he 
may not be the " one and only " child of God, 
he cries out wildly in these modern days for evi- 
dence. He tries to bring spirits back from the 
dead that they may offer him some proof. He 
quests vainly for " revelations " that may sat- 
isfy him. He says with his mouth, "Yes; I 
believe absolutely in God," yet, in his heart, he 
knows that he is half lying, — because of fear 
of what his neighbor will think if he speaks the 
truth. He wants to believe there is a God. He 
wants to know there is a God. Yet he is 
afraid. 

And, personally, I am glad that the time has 
come when he is afraid. I think it is the real 
beginning of his salvation and the dropping- 
away of his egoism. To-day he is beginning to 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 97 

see all life as he did not see it yesterday. And 
to-morrow his eyes will be wide open. 

That is my faith. 1 believe that God is 
greater than humanity has ever conceived him 
to be. I think he is " a common sort of fel- 
low," and I write these words with all the holy 
reverence of which the soul is capable. 1 do 
not mean to imply that I think he is in my form, 
or in any particular form. But he is Life. And 
it is his intention and his desire that every liv- 
ing thing that is worthy of life be a part of 
him. I am almost Indian in this faith. I can 
hear the buoyant, cheering call of Life in a 
waterfall. The inspiration of it comes into my 
own body from out of a whispering tree, from 
a bush glowing with bloom, from a flower, from 
the song of a bird, from the rain itself. I find 
great peace and contentment in my faith that 
this God is everywhere, and that we may meet 
him face to face fifty times a day if we throw 
off the hard shell of our egoism, and realize that 
all nature is God — and that we, as men and 
women and children, are a part of that all- 
embracing nature. 

Even now the sun is filtering through the 
tree-branches upon this partly written page. I 
look at it, and I see again the inconceivable 



98 GOD'S COUNTRY 

greatness of the Supreme Power, and my own 
microscopic littleness. For we of the earth 
have thought that the earth is great, and that 
we, having inherited the earth, are of all things 
greatest. Yet is that sun which warms and 
lights my page as I write — more than a million 
times as large as the earth — more than eight 
hundred thousand miles from one end of its 
diameter to the other. And the still more 
stupendous fact is that this sun is itself only 
a small bit of mechanism in the mighty forces 
of infinity, for there are a hundred million other 
suns in space, each lighting and warming its 
own worlds — innumerable worlds — each peo- 
pled with its own type of flesh and blood, and 
each possessing, perhaps, its own peculiar 
forms of " civilization " and its own savagery. 

Just that great, and vast, and all-embracing 
is the handiwork of that vital force which rules 
all infinity — and to which we have given the 
name of God. 

And here I emphasize again that great truth 
which nature has impressed upon me — that, just 
so long as man considers himself the one and 
only chosen part of God, and therefore next to 
him in greatness, just that long will his egoism 
and self-conceit blind him to the greatness and 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 99 

glory of the real truth, and to the glory of the 
faith which might be his. I believe that Christ 
was a great teacher, that he was a great student 
of his times, and incorporated into his teach- 
ings all that was highest and best in the teach- 
ings of other great men who had lived and 
died before him. And I have always regretted 
that Christ was unfortunate to have for his 
historians a set of men who were unequal to 
their task, many of them narrow-minded, moved 
by " visions " and superstitions instead of fact, 
men who believed in all the miracles of the 
imagination from conversing with angels to 
stopping the smv — men utterly incapable of 
writing down calmly and truthfully those mighty 
teachings of Christ which, had they been written 
as they were spoken, would have meant so much 
for the world to-day. For I believe, in my own 
heart, that Christ was the greatest lover of 
nature that history knows of to the present day. 
1 believe that in the many years of his " dis- 
appearance, " Christ was not only studying the 
teachings of the past, but that, close to the 
breast of nature, he was learning the splendid 
truths of life — all life — which were afterward 
the very heart and soul of his messages to man- 
kind. 



ioo GOD'S COUNTRY 

I believe that Christ, could he return to earth 
to-day, would say: " My biographers have 
given you a wrong impression of me, and they 
have misquoted me. What my soul was called 
upon to teach nineteen hundred years ago, they 
have clothed in the raiment of superstition, of 
misunderstanding, and of impossible miracle. 
For I am a man, even as thee and thine. But 
I have found the true faith. And that faith, as 
I told them then, depends utterly upon the 
dropping of the scales of self from man's eyes, 
and his understanding of all life. For that I 
gladly died." 

The greatest regret I have is that Christ, as 
a man, did not foresee more clearly the tre- 
mendous influence his teachings were to exert 
upon humanity through the ages. Had he 
guessed this, he would have written down with 
his own hand those teachings which were so 
carelessly left to the mercy of superstitious — 
frequently fanatical — and at nearly all times 
incapable biographers. For Christ, of all men 
that ever lived, was undoubtedly one of the best 
and the most humble. His teachings came 
straight from his heart. He did not intend that 
they should be smothered in hyperbole, meta- 
phor, and rhetorical embroidery until no two 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 101 

living men could agree absolutely upon their 
meaning. I believe that he spoke simply and 
directly, for only in that way could he have 
reached the hearts of the masses. And I believe 
that the greatest of all his lessons was the lesson 
of humility. As a man, he had dropped his 
egoism, had submitted himself to the Master of 
all life, and in that submission he had found the 
truth, and the glory of a great faith. The mis- 
fortune of the humanity to follow in after-ages 
was that the world of Jesus Christ was small — 
so small that by word of mouth he could reach 
from end to end of it. Had he dreamed that 
there were still undiscovered worlds so great 
that in comparison his own was but a handful 
of dirt out of a wagon-load, I am convinced 
within myself that the world to-day would not 
be struggling to understand a faith written in 
parables and riddles, for Christ would have set 
his own hand to the task which others so poorly 
accomplished. 

With such a priceless inheritance in the form 
of Christ's own handiwork, I am equally sure 
that humanity would no longer have an excuse 
for its egoism, or be ashamed of that humility 
which is necessary to the understanding of life, 



102 GOD'S COUNTRY 

and essential to the possession of a deep and 
abiding faith. 

I have, at times, heard intelligent people ex- 
press amazement that I should dare to place 
human life on an equal level with all other life, 
that I should so " blaspheme the Creator " as 
to say that the life in a two-legged animal who 
can talk is the same as that in a flower or a 
plant or a tree or some other animal which 
cannot talk. 1 have sometimes allowed myself 
to point out the innumerable advantages pos- 
sessed over man by many living things which 
have no language, as v/e know language. I 
could fill a dozen volumes with word-pictures 
of the thousands and tens of thousands of ad- 
vantages which living things outside of man 
possess over man, and which, if man could 
achieve, would be stupendous miracles. But 
man, collectively, is blinded by his egoism to the 
marvelous attainments of all life that does not 
walk and talk as he walks and talks. When 
confronted by the incontrovertible wonder and 
apparent miracle of other life as compared with 
his own I have nearly always found that men 
and women fall back, as a last resort, on the 
absurd and shallow argument : " But this other 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 103 

life you speak of has only instinct. It cannot 
talk; it cannot reason, and therefore it is im- 
possible for it to have a soul. ,, 

Once a beautiful young matron said to me, 
" There is much in your creed that is inspiring 
and beautiful, but it reaches a point where it is 
inconceivable, for you must concede that a 
human being is the most perfect of all created 
, things." 

I gave her an exquisite rose which I had 
plucked from my garden only a few minutes 
before. 

" There are, outside of men and women and 
children, innumerable things more perfectly 
created than this flower," I said. " Are you, in 
your youth and beauty, as perfect as that rose ? " 

And yet I know that such arguments as these, 
innumerable though they might be, cannot pre- 
vail until men and women bring themselves face 
to face with nature itself, filled with a willing- 
ness and a yearning to understand. They point 
out the pests of life — the serpent, the deadly 
insects, the plants that scar and poison; yet 
they cannot see themselves as perhaps the dead- 
liest and the most relentless of all pests. For it 
is one of the mysterious laws of Creation that 



104 GOD'S COUNTRY 

every living thing — flower, and tree, and beast, 
and man — has a pest born unto it; and unto 
these pests other pests are born, until at last, — 
when the thing is analyzed, — a pest is a pest 
only in so far as its enemy, and not its friends, 
judge it to be a pest. If the world to-day were 
eliminated of human pests as each individual in 
the world might judge for himself, how many 
of us would be left alive to-morrow ? 

And always, when I have listened to the age- 
old arguments prompted by man's egoism and 
self-glorification, I love to return to the peace 
and the comfort of nature, whether that nature 
be in the form of a deep forest, a clover field, 
an orchard, or the little back plot of a crowded 
city home. And if I am where there is no cool 
earth to stand my feet upon, I find my peace and 
rest in the printed pages which describe that 
nature-world of mine. From the most beauti- 
fully written volumes to the honest pages and 
unembellished fact of farm-journals, I have, 
times without number, found enthralling in- 
terest, consolation, and the strength and cour- 
age of the cool and glorious earth itself. 
Nature's Bible is not hard to find. It is every- 
where, living, breathing, printed — the one uni- 
versal and ever-present Book of Life. 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 105 

Whenever I think of the commonest of 
human arguments : u But this other life you 
speak of has only instinct. It cannot talk; 
it cannot reason, and therefore it is impossible 
for it to have a soul," my mind always travels 
back to a certain incident in my experience as a 
refutation. I could, had I the space, answer 
that argument with a hundred compelling facts; 
I might answer it from the point of the flower, 
the vine, the tree, the grass that carpets the 
earth, but I always think first of the particular 
tragedy I am going to describe, because of the 
chief human actor in it, and because this actor 
was, in my humble estimation, one of the most 
physically perfect of her species. 

I will not give her name. She is the daughter 
of one of the best known men in the nation, and 
one of the foremost scientists of the world; and 
should she happen to read these lines, I hope 
that she will see, with a new vision and a 
new understanding, that " triumph " of years 
ago. 

I think she was about twenty when my outfit 
happened to join trails with her father's in the 
far north. She will remember that early after- 
noon when we camped together close to the 
Cochrane, in the Reindeer Lake country. 



io6 GOD'S COUNTRY 

I believe that I am quite reasonably sure of 
myself when I say that she was the most beauti- 
ful woman I had seen up to that time or have 
seen since. It is simply because of her perfec- 
tion that she has always appealed as having 
furnished to me one of the most dramatic 
object-lessons of my experience. She was athrill 
with life. She worshiped her father. She loved 
the sun, the sky, the wind, the trees, the whole 
world. Life seemed to have given her every- 
thing that it possessed — the rare coloring of the 
most beautiful flower under her feet, a form 
that was divine, hair and eyes that no artist 
could paint, and, I think, one of the sweetest 
voices I have ever heard. She is, I have heard, 
beloved in her own environment. She is a 
worker for human betterment, and spends much 
of her time in actual work with the poor. Not 
long ago she was responsible for the building 
of a home for unfortunate little children. 

That day in camp there was a sudden excite- 
ment. Three of the Indians had driven a cow 
moose, a yearling, and a bull into a small cover. 
It was a splendid chance for the girl. I can 
see her eyes glowing with the fires of excitement 
now, as she caught up her rifle and hurried with 
her father and brother and the Indians to the 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 107 

refuge-place of the family of moose. She was 
placed at the head of an open space, and the 
moose were driven out. First came the yearling 
calf, then the mother, and after them came the 
old bull. The girl's lovely face, as I looked at 
it, was flushed. It seemed as though I might 
hear the excited beating of her heart as she 
waited, quivering with the desire to kill. 

She fired first at the calf, and then at the 
mother — and from that moment all that was 
big and beautiful and noble in life seemed to 
leave her own body and enter that of the old 
bull moose. For the first shot had struck the 
calf, laming it so that it could run but slowly, 
with the mother urging it on from behind. Not 
once in the moments that followed did the 
mother run ahead of her calf. And then I be- 
held a thing that I believe to be as noble as 
anything that man has ever done in all the ages. 
Believe, if you will, that the magnificent old 
bull had no reason. Believe, if you cannot sac- 
rifice your egoism, that he did not think. Do 
not give him the credit of possessing a heart or 
a soul or feelings, if that sacrifice of egoism 
hurts you. But consider what happened. 

The old bull ran alongside the cow, along- 
side the calf, and then, by reason or instinct, 



io8 GOD'S COUNTRY 

he knew what had happened. He did not forge 
ahead. He did not race for safety, but de- 
liberately he dropped behind, turned himself 
broadside, and stopped, making of his own 
splendid body a barrier in the path of the 
bullets. 

I heard the girl's rifle cracking. Twice I 
saw the bull flinch, and I knew that he was 
struck. Then I heard her cry out, almost fran- 
tically, that her last shot was gone. In the same 
instant, her brother ran up from the cover and 
thrust his own rifle into her hands. 

" Give it to him, sis! " he cried. " Give it 
to him ! " 

The big bull had turned. He staggered a 
bit as he ran, but in a hundred feet he had over- 
taken the cow and the calf. The calf was going 
still more slowly, and in my desire to see the 
cow and the bull break away, I shouted. 

Almost simultaneously with the sound of my 
voice, the bull stopped again. He placed him- 
self broadside, at perhaps a three-quarter angle, 
so that, by turning his head slightly, he was 
looking back at us. He was directly between 
the cow and the calf, and the girl's bullets con- 
tinued to rip into him. I remember that I cried 
out in protest, but she did not sense my words. 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 109 

Every fiber of her being was strung to the 
thrilling achievement of that crime. She was 
deaf and blind to the nobility of the great- 
hearted beast who, in my eyes, was deliberately 
sacrificing his life. The flaming lust to kill had 
driven all other things out of her heart and soul. 
Her father had run up, and brother and father 
cried out in triumph when the old bull sagged 
suddenly in the middle and almost fell to his 
knees. Four times he had been struck when 
again he went on. 

From my experience in big-game hunting, I 
knew that he was done for. Yet, even in these 
moments when he was dying, the glorious soul 
of him was unafraid. Three hundred yards 
away he stopped and turned again, giving the 
cow and the calf a last chance to reach the tim- 
ber. The girl fired her last shots, and missed. 
Then the bull swung after the cow and the calf 
and disappeared in the cover. But, as he went, 
there came back to us a terrible, deep-chested 
cough, and my heart gave up its hope. It told 
me the heroic old bull was shot through the 
lungs. I did not hurry after the girl and her 
father and brother as they ran over the blood- 
stained trail. I continued to hear the coughing 
for a few moments. Then it was silent. When 



no GOD'S COUNTRY 

I came up to them, just inside the timber, the 
three were standing in triumph close to the dead 
body of the bull. Hardly more than twenty 
paces from it was the yearling calf, dying, but 
not quite dead. The brother had ended it with 
a revolver-shot. 

And then 1 looked at the creature who had 
committed this double murder. Many times I 
had done this same crime, but with me, crude 
and rough, with all the inborn savagery of man, 
killing had not seemed quite so horrible. And 
standing there, a little later, — red-lipped, her 
face aflame, her eyes glowing, exquisite in her 
beauty, — the girl had her picture taken in tri- 
umph as she stood with one booted little foot on 
the neck of her victim. 

When I hear of the vaunted human soul, and 
when men and women tell me there is no soul 
but the soul of a human, my mind goes back to 
that day. I might tell of a hundred other in- 
stances that are convincing unto myself, but that 
one stands out with unforgettable vividness. 

I am sure, for instance, that the soul of a 
flower once saved my life. This is not unusual, 
or even remarkable, for the souls of flowers 
have saved unnumbered lives, as well as giving 
cheer and courage to countless millions; and 



THE ROAD TO FAITH in 

when we die it is still the Soul of the Flower 
that watches over us in our resting-places. No 
place in the world do flowers live more beauti- 
fully than in our gardens of the dead, cheering 
us when we come with our grief to the place of 
our lost ones, giving us courage to go on. Take 
the Soul of the Flower away from us, and the 
world would be hard and bleak to live in. 

To me, the soul is synonymous with life. I 
do not disassociate the two. When we breathe 
our last, our life — our soul — is gone. The two, 
I believe, are one. When we pluck a flower we 
destroy neither, but when we tear it up by the 
roots so that it dies, then has its soul, or its 
life, gone the same way as that of man who 
dies. I have spent many wonderful hours in 
those gardens of the dead which every city, 
hamlet, and countryside must have. To me, 
there are only beauty and the glory of God in a 
cemetery. It seems to me that there, if never 
before, one must come to understand the 
brotherhood of all life. It seems to me that 
the very stillness and peace of a resting-place 
of the dead softly whisper to us the great secret 
which those who are lying there have at last dis- 
covered — that life is the same, that its only dif- 
ference is in form and manifestation. I seem to 



ii2 GOD'S COUNTRY 

feel that I have come into the one place where 
there are only charity and faith and good will, 
and I have always the thought — which to me 
gives courage and hope — that this is why the 
flowers and the trees are so beautiful and so 
comforting there. I have stood in other ceme- 
teries which, to the passing eye, have been 
barren and ugly, where man has lent but very 
feebly a helping hand, but even there, if I 
looked a little closer, I have found the Soul of 
the Flower, the same peace, the same tranquil- 
lity, perhaps even greater courage to inspire one 
to " keep on." 

I have a case in point, so convincing to myself 
that all the preaching in the world could not 
change my sentiment in the matter. I hap- 
pened, at this particular time, to be traveling 
alone in the Northland, and when a certain acci- 
dent befell me, the nearest help I knew of was 
at a half-breed's cabin between twenty and 
thirty miles away. Thirty miles is not a very 
great matter in a country of paved roads and 
level paths, but it is a far distance in a country 
of dense forest and swamp, without trails or 
guide-posts — and especially when one is badly 
crippled. Like the most amateurish tenderfoot, 
I took a chance along the face of a cliff near a 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 113 

small waterfall, slipped, fell, and came tumbling 
down a matter of thirty feet with a sixty-pound 
pack and my rifle on top of me. In the fall, my 
foot received a terrific blow, probably on a pro- 
jecting ledge of rock. 

The man who has faced many situations is 
usually the man who is cautious, and though I 
had just committed an inexcusable error in my 
carelessness, I now lost no time in putting up 
my small silk tent while I could still drag myself 
about. It was well I did so. For ten days 
thereafter, I was not able to rest a pound of 
weight upon my injured foot. 

With the music and refreshing coolness of 
the waterfall less than a hundred feet from my 
tent door, and the creek itself not more than a 
quarter of that distance, I was most fortunately 
situated under the circumstances. The first 
morning after my fall found me almost helpless. 
Every move 1 made gave me excruciating pain. 
My entire foot and ankle, and my leg halfway to 
the knee, were swollen to twice their normal 
size. This first day I dragged myself to a 
sapling, cut it as I lay on my side, and made 
me a rough crutch of it. The second day, my 
entire lower limb was swollen until it had lost 
all semblance to form, and was so badly dis- 



ii4 GOD'S COUNTRY 

colored that a cold and terrible dread began to 
grow in me. I had only thirty cartridges. I 
fired ten that first day, in the futile hope that 
some wandering adventurer might have drifted 
within the sound of my rifle. Occasionally I 
hallooed. Night of the second day found me in 
the beginning of a fever, and, at a cost of physi- 
cal agony, I prepared myself for the worst- 
placed my possessions within the reach of my 
hands, and dragged myself up from the creek 
with a small pail of water. 

I shall never forget the dawn of the third day. 
Racked with pain, with the fever in my blood, 
my leg now stiff as a board to the thigh, I was 
still not blind to the beauty of the morning. The 
rising sun first lighted up the waterfall, then it 
fell in a warm and golden flood where I had 
made my camp. In that silence, broken only by 
the music of the water, every soft note that was 
made by the wild things came to me distinctly. 
It was a morning to put cheer and hope into the 
heart of a dying man. Then my eyes turned, 
and, a few feet beyond the reach of my hand, I 
found something looking at me. 

Yes; to me, in that moment, it was a thing 
living and vibrant with life, and yet it was noth- 
ing more than a flower. It grew on a stem a 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 115 

foot high, and the face of it made me think of 
one of our home-garden pansies; only, the 
flower was all one color, with longer petals — a 
soft, velvety blue. It seemed to have turned to 
face the morning sun, and, in facing the sun, it 
was squarely facing me — a piquant, joyous, 
laughing little face, asking me as clearly as in 
words, " What can possibly be the matter with 
you on this fine morning? " 

I am not going into the psychology or soul- 
language of that flower. I am not going to 
argue about it at all, but simply tell what it did 
for me. Perhaps, if you want to lay it all to 
something, you may say it was because I was out 
of my head a part of the time with fever. But 
that flower was my doctor through the days of 
torture and hopelessness that followed. Now 
and then a bird sang near me; occasionally a 
wild thing would come and peer at me curiously, 
then go its way. But the flower never left me, 
and only turned its face partly away from me 
in the hours of its evening worship. For its 
God was the sun. It faced the sun in the morn- 
ing, wide-awake and open. Late in the after- 
noon, it would turn a little on its stem, and 
with the setting of the sun, its soft petals would 
begin to close, and it would go to sleep, like a 



n6 GOD'S COUNTRY 

little child, with the coming of dusk. Day after 
day, it grew nearer and more of a beloved 
comrade to me. 

After the fourth day, it did not, for an in- 
stant, allow me to think that I was going to die. 
Never for an instant did it lose its cheer and 
confidence. It was there to say " Hello ! " to 
me every morning, and there to say " Good- 
night " to me when the shadows grew deep — 
and all through the day it talked to me, and 
bobbed its little head in the whispers of the 
breezes, and I had the foolish sentiment, at 
times, that it was actually flirting with me. I 
do not think I realized how precious it had 
become to me until, one day, there came a ter- 
rific thunder-storm. I thought the first blast of 
the wind and beat of rain were going to destroy 
my comrade, and, almost in a panic, I dragged 
myself right and left, forgetful of pain, until 
I had built a protection about my flower. 

That was the sixth day, and, from that day, 
the swelling and the pain began to leave my 
limb. On the tenth, I could move about a little 
on my feet. On the fifteenth, 1 was prepared to 
undertake my journey again. I felt a real grief 
in leaving that solitary flower. It had become 
a part of me, had encouraged me in my blackest 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 117 

hours, had cheered and comforted me even in 
the darkness of nights, because I knew it was 
there — my little comrade — waiting for the sun. 
For me, it had individualized itself from among 
all the other flowers in the forest. And now, 
when I was about to go, I saw that the flower 
itself had about lived the span of its life; in a 
very short time it would fade and die. On the 
morning I left, the petals were drooping, and 
its tiny face did not look up at the sun and at 
me as brightly as before, and I fancied that 
I could hear its little voice saying, " Please take 
me with you." And I did. Call it foolish and 
trivial sentiment if you will, but the flower and 
I went together, and afterward I wrote a novel 
and called it " Flower of the North." 

I have often heard strong men say, " Oh, that 
is merely a matter of sentiment. Life is too 
hard and real for a thing like that." 

I agree with them to an extent. Sentiment 
does not play a large part in the world to-day. 
For sentiment, as that word is understood by 
the millions, is the heart and soul of all that is 
good and great. Without sentiment in the 
hearts of a man and a woman, there cannot be 
the fullness of real love between them, even 
though the law has made them man and wife. 



n8 GOD'S COUNTRY 

Without sentiment, no good act is ever done 
from the heart out. Without sentiment — a 
sentiment that warms the soul as a fire warms 
a cold room — there will never be a deep and 
comforting faith. 1 have seen this " co-opera- 
tion of rational power and moral feeling " make 
plain faces beautiful, and I have seen the lack 
of it make others hard as rock. Selfishness, 
egoism, the desire to get everything possible 
out of life, no matter at what expense to others, 
is its antithesis. 

As I write these last pages, I have at hand 
facts which seem to show that sentiment, and 
therefore faith, is as nearly dead as it has ever 
been. For science in all the great nations of the 
earth is planning and plotting frantically for the 
extermination of their fellow men, and this, in 
the hour when all the world is crying out for a 
faith, is what is being achieved: 

Deadly gases that will make gunpowder and 
the rifles anachronisms, that in the next war 
will depopulate whole regions, men, women, 
and little children alike. 

Perfection of the lethal ray, which will 
shrivel up and paralyze human beings over vast 
areas, irrespective of whether they are com- 
batants or not. 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 119 

Development of plans for " germ-warfare," 
whereby whole nations will be infected by 
plagues. 

And then consider the words of one great 
military scientist of the English-speaking race: 
11 Germ-warfare was tried on a small scale in 
the late war, and its results have been promis- 
ing. The method of its use was in the poisoning 
of water supplies with cholera and typhus germs, 
and the loosing of dogs inoculated with rabies 
and of women inoculated with syphilis into the 
enemy country. Here apparently is a promis- 
ing beginning from which vast developments are 
to be hoped for." 

A promising beginning — vast developments 
expected for the future — typhus — rabies — the 
commercial breeding of diseased women. 

Yes; the world is crying aloud for a great 
faith, even as it smashes itself into moral frag- 
ments on the rocks of its own egoism and its 
own selfishness. But there has come a rent in 
its armor, and as it commits crimes and plans 
for still greater crimes, it also begins to realize 
its colossal wickedness. And in its terror it 
shrieks aloud for a manifestation of the Divine 
Power. It demands proof. 

And again I say that the proof is so near that 



120 GOD'S COUNTRY 

the world looks over its head — and does not 
see it. Not until man's egoism crumbles will 
he understand. For ghosts will not come back 
from the dead to quiet his frenzies, nor will 
angels descend from out of the heavens. The 
Divine Power is too great and all-encompassing 
for that. God, speaking of that Power as God, 
is not a trickster. He is not a mountebank. He 
is not a lawyer arguing his case. He is Life. 
And this Life That Never Dies has no fa- 
vorites. Such is my humble faith. 

A long time has passed since I wrote these 
pages. All day the countryside has lain in that 
sleepy, golden shimmer that is the pulse of 
Indian summer. The nights are touched with 
frost. There is glory in the warmth of the sun. 

I am in a little valley that I love — Sleepy 
Hollow, I call it. The farmhouse is old and 
unpainted, and it has stood on its stone founda- 
tion for almost a century. The barn is sagging 
in the middle, and between the barn and the 
house is an old well that a long-dead grand- 
father rigged when the timber in the hollow 
knew the howl of wolves and the screech of bob- 
cats. Crowding close up to the back of the old 
house is an orchard of apple and cherry trees, so 



THE ROAD TO FAITH 121 

old they could tell many an interesting story 
if they could talk. 

And ail about the sides and the front of the 
house are great trees — a huge cottonwood, and 
ancient oaks from which the Indians may have 
shot squirrels with their bows and arrows two 
hundred years ago. The " woman of the 
house " has been in an invalid's chair for years, 
and the husband does little but care for her. 
Therefore Life has crept up and almost in- 
undated the place. The grass grows high and 
uncut. Wild flowers bloom in the yard. Quail 
come to feed with the chickens. And beyond 
this, all about, is the whisper of corn fields in 
growing-time, the ripples of fields of wheat and 
oats and rye, the music of the mowing-machine 
and the lowing of cattle. In this little old 
house of Sleepy Hollow, there is a woman who 
has not walked for years, and who will never 
walk again; and there is a little man with a 
great fierce mustache who watches her tenderly, 
and who knows that he must go on watching her 
until the end of her time — and yet in this house 
there is happiness, and also a great faith. And 
nature seems to rejoice in that faith. Birds 
build their nests under the porches. There is 
melody in the trees. At night, crickets sing in 



I2Z GOD'S COUNTRY 

the long grass under the open windows, and the 
whippoorwills come and perch on the roof 
under the old sycamore. 

Here are suffering— and peace; few of the 
riches of man, but an unlimited wealth of con- 
tentment and faith. These two, prisoned to 
the end of their days, have found what all the 
world is seeking. The little old house of the 
hollow, even with its tragedy, is glad. And life 
has made it so, the understanding of life, the 
voice and living presence of life as it whispers 
about me now in the golden sheen of Indian 
summer. 

And its whisper seems to be, " Men are seek- 
ing me, reaching out for me, crying for me — 
yet they do not find me. They are looking far, 
and I am very near — so far that they look over 
and beyond me when I am waiting at their feet. 
When at last they see me, and understand, then 
will they have discovered the greatest of all 
treasures — Faith! " 



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